ONE VERY BRAVE BOY

BATON ROUGE, La. -- In the chaos that was Causeway Boulevard, this group of refugees stood out: a 6-year-old boy walking down the road, holding a 5-month-old, surrounded by five toddlers who followed him around as if he were their leader.They were holding hands. Three of the children were about 2 years old, and one was wearing only diapers. A 3-year-old girl, who wore colorful barrettes on the ends of her braids, had her 14-month-old brother in tow. The 6-year-old spoke for all of them, and he told rescuers his name was Deamonte Love.Thousands of human stories have flown past relief workers in the last week, but few have touched them as much as the seven children who were found wandering together Thursday at an evacuation point in downtown New Orleans. In the Baton Rouge headquarters of the rescue operation, paramedics tried to coax their names out of them; nurses who examined them stayed up that night, brooding.Transporting the children alone was "the hardest thing I've ever done in my life, knowing that their parents are either dead" or that they had been abandoned, said Pat Coveney, a Houston emergency medical technician who put them into the back of his ambulance and drove them out of New Orleans."It goes back to the same thing," he said. "How did a 6-year-old end up being in charge of six babies?"So far, parents displaced by flooding have reported 220 children missing, but that number is expected to rise, said Mike Kenner of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which will help reunite families. With crowds churning at evacuation points, many children were parted from their parents accidentally; one woman handed her baby up onto a bus, turned around to pick up her suitcase and turned back to find that the bus had left."When my kids were little I used to lose them in Target, so it's not hard for me to believe," said Nanette White, press secretary for Louisiana's Department of Social Services. "Sometimes little kids just wander off. They're there one second and you blink and they're gone."At the rescue headquarters, a cool tile-floored building swarming with firefighters and paramedics, the children ate cafeteria food and fell into a deep sleep. Deamonte volunteered his vital statistics. He said his father was tall and his mother was short. He gave his address, his phone number and the name of his elementary school.He said that the 5-month-old was his brother, Darynael, and that two others were his cousins, Tyreek and Zoria. The other three lived in his apartment building.The children were clean and healthy -- downright plump in the case of the infant, said Joyce Miller, a nurse who examined them. It was clear, she said, that "time had been taken with those kids." The baby was "fat and happy."All evening Thursday as strike teams came and went to the flooded city, volunteer Ron Haynes carried one of the 2-year-old girls back and forth, playing with her until she was calm enough to eat dinner."This baby child was terrified," he said. "After she relaxed, it was gobble, gobble, gobble."As grim dispatches came in from the field, one woman in the office burst into tears at the thought that the children had been abandoned in New Orleans, said Sharon Howard, assistant secretary of the office of public health.Late the same night, they got an encouraging report: A woman in a shelter in Thibodeaux was searching for seven children. People in the building started clapping at the news. But when they got the mother on the phone, it became clear that she was looking for a different group of seven children, Howard said."What that made me understand was that this was happening across the state," she said. "That kind of frightened me."The children were transferred to a shelter operated by the Department of Social Services, rooms full of toys and cribs where mentors from the Big Buddy Program were on hand day and night. For the next two days, the staff did detective work.One of the 2-year-olds steadfastly refused to say her name until a worker took her picture with a digital camera and showed it to her. The little girl pointed at it and cried out, "Gabby!" One of the boys -- with a halo of curly hair -- had a G printed on his T-shirt when he arrived; when volunteers started calling him G, they noticed that he responded.Deamonte began to give more details to Derrick Robertson, a 27-year-old Big Buddy mentor: How he saw his mother cry when he was loaded onto the helicopter. How he promised her he'd take care of his little brother.Late Saturday night, they found Deamonte's mother, who was in a shelter in San Antonio along with the four mothers of the other five children. Catrina Williams, 26, saw her children's pictures on a website set up over the weekend by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. By Sunday, a private plane from Angel Flight was waiting to take the children to Texas.In a phone interview, Williams said she is the kind of mother who doesn't let her children out of her sight. What happened the Thursday after the hurricane, she said, was that her family, trapped in an apartment building on the 3200 block of Third Street in New Orleans, began to feel desperate.The water wasn't going down and they had been living without light, food or air conditioning for four days. The baby needed milk and the milk was gone. So she decided they would evacuate by helicopter. When a helicopter arrived to pick them up, they were told to send the children first and that the helicopter would be back in 25 minutes. She and her neighbors had to make a quick decision.It was a wrenching moment. Williams' father, Adrian Love, told her to send the children ahead."I told them to go ahead and give them up, because me, I would give my life for my kids. They should feel the same way," said Love, 48. "They were shedding tears. I said, 'Let the babies go.' "His daughter and her friends followed his advice."We did what we had to do for our kids, because we love them," Williams said.The helicopter didn't come back. While the children were transported to Baton Rouge, their parents wound up in Texas, and although Williams was reassured that they would be reunited, days passed without any contact. On Sunday, she was elated."All I know is I just want to see my kids," she said. "Everything else will just fall into place."At 3 p.m. Sunday, DSS workers said goodbye to seven children who now had names: Deamonte Love; Darynael Love; Zoria Love and her brother Tyreek. The girl who cried "Gabby!" was Gabrielle Janae Alexander. The girl they called Peanut was Degahney Carter. And the boy whom they called G was actually Lee -- Leewood Moore Jr.The children were strapped into car seats and driven to an airport, where they were flown to San Antonio to rejoin their parents. As they were loaded into the van, the shelter workers looked in the windows.The baby gaped with delight in the front seat. Deamonte was hanging onto Robertson's neck so desperately that Robertson decided, at the last minute, to ride with him as far as Lafayette.Shelter worker Kori Thomas held Zoria, 3, who reached out to smooth her eyebrows. Tyreek put a single fat finger on the van window by way of goodbye.Robertson said he doubted the children would remember much of the helicopter evacuation, the Causeway, the sweltering heat or the smell of the flooded city."I think what's going to stick with them is that they survived Hurricane Katrina," he said. "And that they were loved."
Copyright © 2005, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

Hurricane Reality vs. Right-Wing Ideology
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet

Posted on September 8, 2005,
Printed on September 8, 2005
Hurricane Katrina blew away not only roofs, levees and lives, but also some of the right's most cherished -- and well-funded -- beliefs. The depth of the disconnect between the right's narrative of what American society should look like and the facts on the ground was almost unspinnable. Reality was hard to stave off in the aftermath of such a disaster.
Some tried. The Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger took the opportunity to argue that "poorly incentivized" public bureaucracies "are going to get us killed" and call for outsourcing emergency response functions.
The National Review's Kate O'Beirne wrote that the contrast between Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco and Mississippi's Haley Barbour should leave Hillary Clinton supporters "dismayed at the latest example of why voters might be leery of women chief executives."
Further on the fringe, blogger Michael Calderon at David Horowitz's Frontpage Magazine saw in Katrina the potential for a civil war following a major terror attack in the U.S. and envisioned a Hobbesian war of all against all, predicting -- with just a bit too much enthusiasm -- this apocalyptic scenario:
Expect heavily armed and infuriated conservatives to launch a cleansing war against the traitors. The armed will mow down the mostly unarmed segments, especially those elements that devoted 40-plus years to anti-American hatred to destroy this country. Should the likes of Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Michael Parenti, Michael Moore, Ward Churchill, Dennis Raimondo [sic], et al. act out their sedition ... expect their bodies to be found shot full of holes ... Leftist professors will be strung up. It will be every man, woman, and child for themselves.
And, also predictably, other nutters saw the storm as part of God's wrath for New Orleans' sinful ways (ignoring that some of the staunchest Bible-belt counties in the South were also devastated).
The first ideological victim of the hurricane on the right was the notion of a classless, race-blind society in which we all share the same opportunity to thrive. A media that routinely deletes any reference to race and class was forced to openly confront the desperate and almost purely monochromatic reality of the hurricane's survivors.
The notion -- briefly floated by some conservatives -- that Katrina's victims have some personal responsibility for not leaving when the evacuation orders came down was swiftly deflated. The Washington Post noted that "living paycheck to paycheck made leaving impossible":
To those who wonder why so many stayed behind when push came to water's mighty shove here, those who were trapped have a simple explanation: Their nickels and dimes and dollar bills simply didn't add up to stage a quick evacuation mission.
The New York Times' David Brooks -- who seemed especially shaken by the images coming out of the Gulf Coast -- lamented that Katrina represented a confidence-shattering rip in our social fabric as "the rich escaped while the poor were abandoned," a move he called "the moral equivalent of leaving the injured on the battlefield."
On the question of class, the storm landed at an inopportune moment for conservatives. Katrina hit smack in the middle of a year-long public debate about the United States' growing inequality (in just about every way one can measure it).
The back and forth started in May, when both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal [$$] (followed by others) began a series on the growing wealth gap in America. The right responded with the usual charge that a liberal agenda was cooking the books -- despite Alan Greenspan weighing in that there was, indeed, a potential problem -- and, alternatively, that what matters isn't what class we belong to but what class we believe we belong to, an argument voiced by, among others, Bruce Bartlett in the National Review.
While Katrina didn't have any direct impact on the debate, images are more visceral than statistics. It's hard to sit in a comfortable, dry place watching the abandoned poor fight for their lives, and argue that the growing class divide in this country is a figment of the left's imagination, or that our current socio-economic arrangements are the best we can do.
Directly related to class is the idea of social cohesion. "United we stand" is a central tenet of the American narrative. Whatever your background, your status, your ideology, we pull together when the chips are down. But in New Orleans it became clear just how transparent that fiction is. Our sense of community -- if the ideal ever truly existed -- has now deteriorated to such a degree that only the threat of deadly violence holds the whole show together.
The scenes of a powder keg with its lid blown off rattled many on the right, despite the fact that in many ways it accords with the conservative view of human nature. Peggy Noonan wrote, "a bad turn in human behavior frays and tears all the ties that truly bind human beings -- trust, confidence, mutual regard" and hoped that "the looters are shot."
The Wall Street Journal editorialized that a "battle" was underway in New Orleans, and called the disorder "the most disturbing part" of the tragedy. National Review Editor Rich Lowry urged readers to buy guns, and wondered whether the current crop of Republican leaders had read Thomas Hobbes, or "does he not make the 'compassionate conservative' reading list?"
Compassionate conservatism, and President Bush's image as a strong and engaged leader -- so carefully groomed -- took a major, perhaps unrecoverable, hit. That aspect has been discussed ad nauseum, so I won't dwell on it, except to say that you would be very hard-pressed to script a more damaging set of images than the President ordering his jet to descend to a low altitude so he could "review the damage" from his window, and his subsequent arrival at the White House with a cute little puppy. Many conservatives expressed deep shock at the administration's utter disconnect, even more so than at its inaction.
Katrina will also play an important role in future debates about the roles of the public and private sectors. The storm came ashore during a year in which it was officially announced that FEMA would lose its disaster preparedness function. The Bush administration has taken heat. As a local emergency management director wrote in the Washington Post, "The advent of the Bush administration in January 2001 signaled the beginning of the end for FEMA. The newly appointed leadership of the agency showed little interest in its work ... Soon FEMA was being absorbed into the 'homeland security borg.'"
The Houston Chronicle editorialized that the fact that "our first-world nation has demonstrated a shockingly third-world capability to care for its citizens" essentially "smashed the myth" that obsessively cutting taxes doesn't carry a cost.
There will be more such criticism to come. How much impact it will have remains to be seen, but it's clear that the problem with New Orleans' disaster preparedness was not too much government, but too little, too late. That simple fact, at its heart, was what rattled so many conservatives so deeply.
Joshua Holland is a fair-trade activist, a freelance writer and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer blog.
© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

From Blondie's Mailbox

Another Point of View From Toni

Casualties of War: Camp Casey and New Orleans
By Starhawk

When Katrina hit, I was at Camp Casey in Crawford, Texas, where I had gone to support Cindy Sheehan, the Gold Star mother who encamped outside of Bushs ranch to demand a meeting so she could ask him one simple question, What noble cause did my son die for? Cindy is a formidable woman, a fearless woman because she has already lost what she most loved. Loss and grief are powerful forces. Camp Casey was full of those who had suffered the real losses of the Bush administrations war on Iraq, the families of soldiers, returning veterans, Gold Star Mothers who had lost a child in Iraq. Along the roadside stood a vast field of crosses to represent the dead. Across the road, a small encampment of pro-war counter-demonstrators would gather each day. They didnt stay overnight. On our side, we camped in a ditch, in the hundred and five degree heat, itching from sweat and chigger bites. The counter-protestors shouted slogans and drove up and down the road in cars decorated with signs proclaiming their love for Bush, honking. David, my partner, a veteran of the civil rights movement and a draft resistor in Vietnam, thought they needed some lessons in taunting. Hes been taunted by better in his timethe outfront racists, the fanatic anti-communists. The worst our counter demonstrators mustered was a sign saying, The Sixties are overwhy dont you go home! Someone on our side countered with a sign reading, The Fifties are overwhy dont YOU go home? Bush and his allies are experts at manufacturing emotion, whipping up fear, exploiting the dead. But here the air was permeated by real and personal loss. You have to understand, the woman said to me. My mother does not go out. She doesnt leave the house. Her mother, standing next to her, nodded in agreement. We were outside the big tent where the rally was being held, at Camp Casey Two, up the road from our campsite. But I told her, you have to come. You have to see this. The woman was blond, late thirties, conservatively dressed, in a big sunhat . She spoke with a Texas accent, and she and her mother looked like archetypal Republicans. Nothing looks prettier than a young man in a uniform, she said, smiling sadly but when you look at whats underneath, its not so pretty. Her brother had come back from the first Gulf War, mentally and emotionally shattered, and had never recovered. And thats what drew her mother out, to gather with others who had also lost real children, real lives. I told her about Billy, the son of my best friend from junior high school. Mary and I played with paper dolls and screamed for the Beatles and went wild together in the Sixties. She was the first of my friends to get pregnant, when we were nineteen, and I helped her through the stress of telling her ultraconservative family, her hasty marriage and messy divorce. Then we lost touch for many years. I remember Billy as a sweet two-year-old with angelic curls. He grew up to be the second soldier across the line in the first Gulf War. I reconnected with Mary shortly after he took a gun to the beach and shot himself, one of the thousands of uncounted casualties, suicides, chronically ill, lefovers from that adventure. The homeless shelters and the cold streets are still filled with men of my own generation, the living ghosts of Vietnam. Meanwhile veterans services are being cut back, hospitals closed. My aunt and uncle from the communist side of the family worked all their lives for the VA, proudly, because as my aunt said it was the closest thing to socialism in this country. They enjoyed providing free treatment for people. Perhaps that is why the same warmongers, so eager to create new casualties, refuse to adequately fund their ongoing care. The people at Camp Casey talked about being on someone elses mission, about chains of command and getting orders from above, which they agreeably followed. This place is run like the military, one of my friends remarked. We are the military, was the answer. They were indeed the military, the people in this country most directly affected by the reality of war, Gold Star Mothers who had lost a child in Iraq, returning veterans, Veterans for Peace, military families. They wore cowboy hats and spoke in real Texas accents: Bushs natural base, in rebellion not at the concept of authority but at his misuse and abuse of the authority entrusted to him. Most people there were from Texas, many of them surprised and delighted to meet other Texans who opposed the war. A whole contingent was from Louisiana, and New Orleans. And so on Sunday night when the news reports were tracking Katrinas progress and predicting the disaster of New Orleans, the mood at the camp was grim. I was over at Camp Casey Two, where a big tent was set up for meetings and rallies. I was trying to be helpful by making a list of all the stuff needed for the caravans which would be setting out when the camp closed on a speaking tour, mobilizing people for the September 24 march on Washington. On the screen a video was playing detailing the effects of depleted uranium, showing pictures of the deformed babies born in Iraq, cyclops babies with only one eye in the center of the forhead, babies with heads like tumors, babies that are nothing but undifferentiated lumps of flesh. And at my feet, a man from New Orleans was crying and raging. The bridges were closed, and no one could get out any longer. The news was predicting that thousands might die. The petrochemical industry and the developers have long ruled in the Gulf, with free reign to destroy the wetlands that are natures buffer against storms. A huge proportion of the Louisiana National Guard, which is supposed to take charge during natural disasters, was in Iraq. The rest were apparently in Florida, moving military equipment out of the path of the storm. The funds for flood control and reinforcing the levees had been systematically cut by the Bush administration in order to fund our attacks on Baghdad and Fallujah. Hurricanes are fueled by the warmth of the ocean, and the Gulf is abnormally hot due to global warming, which Bush and his allies will not admit is happening. Global warming may not have caused Hurrican Katrina, but it undoubtedly amplified its power and fury. New Orleans, like Casey Sheehan, is a casualty of war. And I imagine Cindy joined in her vigil by a mother from New Orleans, perhaps one whose baby died in her arms of dehydration at the Superdome, to ask, Why did my child die? And Bush, if he were honest would have to say to her, Your child died of incompetence and callousness justified by a set of false assumptions: That the current economy and technology, fueled by cheap oil and gas, can and should continue in its current form. That the profits of those who benefit from the current system are of paramount importance, and should be protected at all costs. That war is good for business. That environmental impacts dont need to be counted as part of the cost of doing business and so dont count. That technology has transcended nature. That global warming has no real consequences. That government owes nothing in the way of care and support to its citizens. That the lives of the poor arent worth much, anyway, especially if they happen to be black. That the way to respond to uncomfortable questions is to sneer at and smear the questioner. That a good media spin can redefine and outweigh reality. But reality has a way of being, well, real, and catching up with you. Real loss, real grief are the real results of the Bush administrations policies. His neocon friends maintain their power by manufacturing fear, exploiting the dead. But now the real dead are coming back to haunt them. And so I imagine Cindy and the mother from New Orleans joined by a legion of mothers from Iraq. I envision the roads of Crawford lined with the corpses of Baghdad and Fallujah, with the one-eyed monstrous stillbirths, the children blown to pieces, caked with flesh, soaked with blood. I hear a chorus of voices asking, Why? What noble cause? What great gift are you bringing us? What is this democracy that abandons the poor to drown? I see them laying the bodies at the gates of power. I see us joining them, to turn the to a wind of justice, a wind of change. Hurricane season has just begun.
* * *
Some places to send aid: Families and Friends of Louisianas Incarcerated Children are doing intense work among the shelters and prisons with displaced youth, mostly African American. Believe me, the Red Cross and the Christian charities wont be pouring out relief to this group! They can also use some volunteers (especially African American) and many gifts in kind. Send a check to the FFLIC Hurricane Relief Fund to 920 PlattStreet, Sulphur, Louisiana, 70663.awakenprogress@yahoo.comkd.higgs@yahoo.com The Veterans for Peace bus that was at Camp Casey in Crawford, TX has now gone down to Covington, Louisiana to do relief work. They also need donations of money and computer equipment.Make a donation to Veterans For Peace Chapter 116 http://www.vfproadtrips.orgTax deductible cash donations can be send to:Contact: Veterans For Peace Chapter 11628500 Sherwood RdWillits CA 95490pjtate@sonic.netCell PH 707-536-3001 Food Not Bombs will be providing food for refugees. They can use volunteers to prepare and serve food, and, of course, donations.www.foodnotbombs.net. You can make a financial donation on line or mail checks to Food Not Bombs, P.O. Box 744, Tucson, AZ 85702. Please call (1-800-884-1136) or email (katrina@foodnotbombs.net ) us if you can join them on the bus or help with gas money. Starhawkwww.starhawk.org Feel free to post, forward, and reprint this article for non-commercial purposes. All other rights reserved. Starhawk is an activist, organizer, and author of The Earth Path, Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising, The Fifth SacredThing and other books on feminism, politics and earth-based spirituality. She teaches Earth Activist Trainings that combine permaculture design and activist skills, www.earthactivisttraining.org and works with the RANT trainers collective, www.rantcollective.net that offers training and support for mobilizations around global justice and peace issues. Donations to help support Starhawks trainings and work can be sent to:ACT1405 Hillmount St. Austin, Texas 78704 U.S.A. To get her periodic posts of her writings, email Starhawk-subscribe@lists.riseup.net and put subscribe in the subject heading. If youre on that list and dont want any more of these writings, email Starhawk-unsubscribe@lists.riseup.net and put unsubscribe in the subject heading.