PARANOIA

I have a very good friend who forced me to take off my rose colored glasses and allowed me to grow to the point where I began to see the truth. One of the things he always said was that it is not paranoia if they are really out to get you. The more I read and hear about what happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina I am forced to conclude that thousands were supposed to die. If that turns out not to be true it is because the will to live among descendants of people of the African Diaspora is more powerful than the mission to kill us. Unfortunately we might not ever know for sure how many died in New Orleans because the body counts that I am hearing up to this point are a joke. I have heard at least one hundred people interviewed report that they saw at least ten dead bodies personally. Unless they were seeing the same ten bodies that's 1000 dead in New Orleans just by random eyewitness accounts.

What follows is another eyewitness account sent to me from a friend of a friend. It discounts the notion of looters and irresponsible young black men using the hurricane for their own selfishness. It also is disturbing in that it could easily be a description of how slaves were treated. One would not know from reading this account that it is told by an American citizen about her treatment in a modern day American city by those assigned to protect her and her fellow victims.



(From a friend at the Univ of Texas. It seems to me that everyone
should hear this - it's so easy to believe that it was mad gangs with
guns roaming New Orleans as we have been told when in fact there is
another story to tell)

*The following message is from an African- American former graduate
student at UT. She, Lisa Moore, whom I don't know, is writing about
what her aunt, Denise, told her. I begin in mid-message.*

The buses came and took them to the Ernest Memorial Convention Center.
(Yes, the convention center you've all seen on TV.)

Denise said she thought she was in hell. They were there for 2 days,
with no water, no food. No shelter. Denise, her mother (63 years old), her niece (21 years old), and 2-year-old grandniece. When they arrived, there were already thousands
of people there. They were told that buses were coming. Police drove by, windows rolled
up, thumbs up signs. National Guard trucks rolled by, completely empty,
soldiers with guns cocked and aimed at them. Nobody stopped to drop off
water. A helicopter dropped a load of water, but all the bottles
exploded on impact due to the height of the helicopter.

The first day (Wednesday) 4 people died next to her.
The second day (Thursday) 6 people died next to her.
Denise told me the people around her all thought they had been sent
there to die. Again, nobody stopped. The only buses that came were full;
they dropped off more and more people, but nobody was being picked up and taken away. They found out that those being dropped off had been
rescued from rooftops and attics; they got off the buses delirious from
lack of water and food. Completely dehydrated. The crowd tried to keep
them all in one area; Denise said the new arrivals had mostly lost their
minds. They had gone crazy.

Inside the convention center, the place was one huge bathroom. In order
to shit, you had to stand in other people's shit. The floors were black
and slick with shit. Most people stayed outside because the smell was so
bad. But outside wasn't much better: between the heat, the humidity,
the lack of water, the old and very young dying from dehydration... and
there was no place to lay down, not even room on the sidewalk.
They slept outside Wednesday night, under an overpass.

Denise said yes, there were young men with guns there. But they
organized the crowd. They went to Canal Street and "looted," and brought
back food and water for the old people and the babies, because nobody
had eaten in days. When the police rolled down windows and yelled out
"the buses are coming," the young men with guns organized the crowd in
order: old people in front, women and children next, men in the back.
Just so that when the buses came, there would be priorities of who got
out first.

Denise said the fights she saw between the young men with guns were
fist fights. She saw them put their guns down and fight rather than
shoot up the crowd. But she said that there were a handful of people shot in the convention
center; their bodies were left inside, along with other dead babies and
old people.

Denise said the people thought there were being sent there to die. Lots
of people being dropped off, nobody being picked up. Cops passing by,
speeding off. National Guard rolling by with guns aimed at them.
And yes, a few men shot at the police, because at a certain point all
the people thought the cops were coming to hurt them, to kill them all.
She saw a young man who had stolen a car speed past, cops in pursuit; he
crashed the car, got out and ran, and the cops shot him in the back, in front of the whole crowd. She saw many groups of people decide that they were going to walk across
the bridge to the west bank, and those same groups would return, saying
that they were met at the top of the bridge by armed police ordering
them to turn around, that they weren't allowed to leave.

So they all believed they were sent there to die.

Denise's niece found a pay phone, and kept trying to call her mother's
boyfriend in Baton Rouge, and finally got through and told him where
they were. The boyfriend, and Denise's brother, drove down from Baton Rouge and
came and got them. They had to bribe a few cops, and talk a few into
letting them into the city ("come on, man, my 2-year-old niece is at the
Convention Center!"), then they took back roads to get to them.

After arriving at my other cousin's apartment in Baton Rouge, they saw
the images on TV, and couldn't believe how the media was portraying the
people of New Orleans. She kept repeating to me on the phone last
night: make sure you tell everybody that they left us there to die.
Nobody came. Those young men with guns were protecting us. If it wasn't
for them, we wouldn't have had the little water and food they had
found.

That's Denise Moore's story.