| an ill wind that doesn't blow someone some good. The co-op's marketer told us they had wanted to sell their produce to Kraft, but Kraft wouldn't take it for various made-up reasons. One of their fields had been spared the damage that struck other farms. That was when Kraft changed its mind and wanted to buy their produce. The co-op decided to give their produce to the churches on the Gulf that were feeding the victims of Hurricane Katrina for free. Family Farm Defenders left with the promise of more tractors being brought to Mississippi. We drove to New Orleans the next day -- arriving too late in the day to join the Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and New Orleans Mayor Nagin led march to delay the elections. So many of the city's voters were scattered hither and yon presenting electoral access problems. Claims were made that with half the population, mostly the poor and Black, a fair election was impossible. The highways were bordered with jack pines snapped, bent and twisted into unusual shapes by the hurricane, but the outlines of the green tendrils of a new spring both softened and underlines the devastation. No such mercy was evident in the city. In the affected neighborhoods, the people are mostly gone; streets are empty; houses and cars are muddy, molding, rotting carcasses of another civilization. It was as though I walked the streets of Pompeii and Herculinium, those ancient Roman cities destroyed by a volcano. Today, those cities are alive with tourists. What few tourists there are in New Orleans are in the spared French Quarter and Bourbon Street. Across the street from the hostel where we stayed was a church. There had been a funeral service for an elderly parishioner. None of his family was left in the city. Those who could had come from Alabama and Texas. The others had been blown by the big wind and flood to other states. The family shared the funeral repast with us. We visited a church the diocese wanted to shut. It was a familiar crises. As the hierarchy of the church struggled with diminishing offerings from inner city parishioners and increasing costs from the sexual scandals, prime pieces of real estate are exchanged and sold. St. Augustine is the oldest congregation of Black Catholics in the United States. They were not about to give up without a struggle. Shortly after we came home, we heard that the congregation had won and would stay open. Several of the younger people with us had been to New Orleans recently to work with the relief efforts. The large private and governmental agencies that people have traditionally looked to for help were unable to adequately function in ths tragedy. Whether because of the epic proportions of the tragedy or corruption and greed, it fell to the small groups who came, to try to provide remedies. They were the ones who created outposts of help: clinics, Common Ground, encampments where houses were gutted and taken over as headquarters. The self-organization was a notable feat filling the vacuum left by the authorities. I remember the attitudes of the youth of the Civil Rights Movement. This was different. This was an almost individualized expression of helping people in need, directed by the people on the ground, not by an establishment with a national office. Almost impossibly, things were being done. When the younger people talked about it, it came across as inspirational, not prophetic. Neighborhood social needs not political activity. Activism was the immediate, gutting a house, shoveling the mud and debris, helping this person and that family. It meant that some things could not be attended to. The pollution in the air and on the ground in the area was almost taken for granted. The ever-present odor of wet lumber and mold, the particulate matter entering the residents and workers' lungs were not countered by routine occupational safety measures like the wearing of masks. I went on the Family Farm Defenders trip to the South to bring back information and to fulfill the desire to see for myself what had happened in the aftermath of Katrina and Rita. I came back heartened by how people had risen to the occasion, instituting new forms of social expression where needed, reaching out to newfound neighbors obliterating the geography that defined a neighbor as in the block or quarter demonstrating that old expression of the civil rights and anti-war movements of the Power of the People. Note: Mayor Nagin led with 37% of the vote in the New Orleans primary. There are two bills in Congress to get rid of FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or to reform it, but still leave it attached to Homeland Security. |
| Americans to the rescue while authorities dither by Lea Zeldin |
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| (Above) Family Farm Defenders deliver a donated tractor to farmers in Mississippi affected by Hurricane Katrina. |
| A cavalcade of two vans, a car, and a semi hauling a flat bed loaded with five rehabilitated tractors carrried some 20 of us to the annual meeting of the Family Farm Defenders, a farm advocacy organization. FFD was invited to hold their meeting at the Southern Federation of Mississippi Cooperatives outside Hattiesberg, Mississippi where we were joined by three board members who flew in. Good deeds do not go unnoticed. The delivery of the tractors was celebrated with the requisite press conference. Madison reporters accompanied the tractors; local media, radio, and TV came, and even some sellers of the Militant paper. Getting the tractors off the flatbed was an awesome display of masculine strength and skill. We applauded like passengers on an airplane after a successful landing. It's an old saying that says it is |
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