On the road to New Orleans

The following is from cell phone reports to Workers World newspaper from Johnnie Stevens, an organizer for the Million Worker March, and Teresa Gutierrez, a Troops Out Now Coalition national organizer, from “Camp Casey New Orleans” in Covington, La.

9 a.m: At ‘Camp New Orleans’

Teresa Gutierrez: We’re here, an hour outside of New Orleans, at the anti-war camp where activists have renamed their Camp Casey to honor the heroic people of this besieged city.

The progressive movement is going to have to work non-stop to make sure that what is really happening here comes out. This totally reminds me of the Trail of Tears and the relocation of Native American people.

You turn on the radio in Baton Rouge and you hear the white DJs talk about this tragedy and the need to pull together to help each other and love each other, and celebrating how New Orleans is “coming back,” but then they’re talking about the traffic conditions and weather.

The reality for the most oppressed is extreme horror, terror, displacement and relocation, and those who did not die will not have a chance to go back there unless there is a mass movement to demand it, to fight for it.

There’s no government attempt to take a census. There’s a woman we talked to who was evacuated to the Houston Astrodome. She has no idea where her family is. She has nothing left. She is so traumatized. She told us, “I’m just trying to keep my sanity.”

Imagine losing everything and then having to live with 20,000 people in a dome, with all those contradictions, and not know where your family is. When buses took people out of New Orleans, they drop ped them off wherever the government wanted to. Even if the bus passed right here on a road where people had family that could take care of them, the government wouldn’t let them get off the bus.

There’s this human toll that they’re trying to cover up. Everything is left to the collective good will of people, while the Red Cross and government do nothing. We talked to one of the Veterans for Peace people here whose sister, a nurse, volunteered to come down here to New Orleans, but the Red Cross said no, there were enough people here already.

People here on the ground know that there are not enough.

The movement has to demand to know why is the government turning away help, if not because they want more death and destruction. The government is calling for forced evacuation right now—people are opposed to that.

Johnny Stevens: Yesterday, we were in Baton Rouge interviewing people at a Muslim outreach center for relief in a predominately Black neighborhood.

The people we talked to told us they like to be called evacuees—not refugees, because of how that word is negatively associated by the press.

We interviewed one guy who said there are meetings going on there about the neighborhood helping people—the Red Cross and FEMA weren’t helping—they were.

We talked to a 3-year-old child who said, “I want my father!” We talked to a mother who told us she lost two of her kids. Another woman was saying, like a lot of these people are saying, they don’t know where anybody’s at. She asked, “How’s someone gonna know where I’m at; that I’m safe?”

We interviewed a white couple who was forced out of their home. The police came and told them they had to leave. They were telling us that hundreds of people were being dropped off on the bridge in the hot sun. There was no food, no water, but a whole lot of helicopters—five or six—always in the air, all day long, and they wasn’t helping.

We talked to at least eight white people who said that the real aim now was to bring the rich people in and this was the opportunity. It’s what everybody was saying. And everybody is very angry. The most glaring anger is that they won’t allow people to come in to help when the city is underwater and over a million people need help.

And they’re very young: 18 to 30-something, 40-something. And very angry. They said how come Bush had an aircraft carrier right there on the port but didn’t bring it in to rescue them? They saying $10 billion in so-called aid isn’t equal to the amount of people that was in need. They were clear that it was racism, that FEMA and the Red Cross wasn’t bringing any help in to them.

We’re here at Covington where the Veterans for Peace set up Camp Casey and Cindy Sheehan gave them a bus to set it up. They’re going out to all the different parishes and dropping food off daily. Another group here from Tennessee is doing the same thing. So far the Army is letting them in, but today is supposed to be the end of that.

Right now, we’re on our way to New Orleans.

Noon: On a back road to Algiers

Johnnie Stevens: We are trying to get off the highway into Algiers, a parish of New Orleans, but the road is blocked everywhere by soldiers. Teresa says it looks like Colombia.

They got us off the highway. They waved us away onto a highway ramp and sent us down to a back road, but that was blocked by soldiers, too.

We’re riding a back road now. You can see the destruction of slums; a lot of the trees cut down by the storm. There’s dead animals all over the place.

The whole time we’ve been on the road —from Baton Rouge, Lafayette, St. Charles parish—we haven’t heard no Cajun music, no blues and no jazz on the radio stations. This whole thing seems like ethnic cleansing.

The traffic last night was so incredible. They’re not accepting credit cards at hotels, gas stations. We picked up two white youth, on their way to the hospital to visit their parents whose prior medical conditions were agitated by all the stress, and we stopped to get gas. We met a woman there who couldn’t get no gas ’cause that’s all she got was a credit card.

Algiers is right over the bridge. Our aim is to make it into Algiers.