'New Orleans is our Gettysburg', A Generation's Defining Event

[AGENDA21]

This Saturday's elections in New Orleans represent yet another element of the vast crime committed against Black America. With as many as 300,000 residents, overwhelmingly African American, strewn about the country in government-engineered exile, the elections are an insult to the very idea of democracy, and to the dignity of all Black people.

This farcical exercise in faux democracy will no doubt be followed by corporate media declarations that New Orleans is returning to "normalcy" - the same term that the media bandied about when the city held a shrunken Mardi Gras, in February.

Behind that bland word, "normalcy," lies a wish list and narrative that sees white rule as normative in America - the way things should be - and Black electoral power as an aberration, a kind of organized pathology in which people are assumed to be up to no good. Despite Katrina's vast damage to Louisiana infrastructure and commerce, there is a current of elation among white elites and common folk alike, at the winds and waters that cleansed New Orleans of its two-thirds Black majority, which was seen as a sore on the body politic, a den of Otherness and iniquity.

The white American narrative, which begins with national "democratic" elections after the birth of the republic in which only a tiny fraction of the population - white male owners of substantial property - could vote, bestows mythic significance to the electoral exercise, no matter how bogus and profoundly undemocratic. Thus, two ink-dipped elections in U.S.-occupied Iraq are heralded as benchmarks of progress, despite the deepening and widening conflict and misery that afflict the Iraqi people. In New Orleans, the mystical mantra of elections in which the majority of the population cannot fully participate, is equated with a kind of "recovery" from the storm and flood - when no such thing has occurred.

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0422-23.htm

[Zen Democrat]

1. It's time for a Democrat to make a new "Gettysburg Address"

to renew our democracy and uphold government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

[msongs]

2. so tell us how YOU would run New Orleans and conduct elections

in a way that is better. it is one thing to criticize (justly or unjustly) and quite another help
instead of being another critic. Don't be part of the problem, be part of the solution.

Msongs
www.msongs.com/political-shirts.htm

[hlthe2b]

3. NOLA is an AMERICAN tragedy..

not one to be claimed by either side of the civil war. Using this metaphor will divide us, imo. Unfortunately, many southerners-- who largely will be taking great offense at the Bush* administration's turning its back on a once-great southern city-- will not respond well to a "OUR GETTYSBURG" metaphor. I agree with the content of the article and I think most would, otherwise.

[Vampgrrl]

4. Well that's not accurate....racial divides have screwed NOLA for years

In all fairness I love New Orleans but NOLA has been a city in decline for years and years, much having to do with the business unfriendly enviroment in the city, high taxes and tolerance for crime. Having a population far below the poverty line didn't help, and trading government subsidies for votes was the nail in the coffin. (Most wealthy people in New Orleans are pretty liberal, they aren't big corporate types).

I tell you what if New Orleans doesn't get fixed and I mean more than post Katrina I mean it's decline stopped....it will die. And anyone who has been there knows it is one of the crown jewels of the United States, that city enbodies who we are, where we all come from.

I live in Atlanta, a majority black city with many whites...granted the culture here sucks but it is a good place to make a living and there is a lot in the way of economic opportunity.

I always say better dead in New Orleans, than alive in Atlanta though.
I'm moving to NOLA.