Leaving New Orleans

I just left New Orleans a couple hours ago. I traveled from the apartment I was staying in by boat to a helicopter to a refugee camp. If anyone wants to examine the attitude of federal and state officials towards the victims of hurricane Katrina, I advise you to visit one of the refugee camps.

In the refugee camp I just left, on the I-10 freeway near Causeway, thousands of people (at least 90 percent black and poor) stood and squatted in mud and trash behind metal barricades, under an unforgiving sun, with heavily armed soldiers standing guard over them. When a bus would come through, it would stop at a random spot, state police would open a gap in one of the barricades, and people would rush for the bus, with no information given about where the bus was going.

Once inside (we were told) evacuees would be told where the bus was taking them -- Baton Rouge, Houston, Arkansas, Dallas, or other locations. I was told that if you boarded a bus bound for Arkansas (for example), even people with family and a place to stay in Baton Rouge would not be allowed to get out of the bus as it passed through Baton Rouge. You had no choice but to go to the shelter in Arkansas. If you had people willing to come to New Orleans to pick you up, they could not come within 17 miles of the camp.

I traveled throughout the camp and spoke to Red Cross workers, Salvation Army workers, National Guard and state police, and although they were friendly, no one could give me any details on when buses would arrive, how many, where they would go, or any other information.

I spoke to the several teams of journalists nearby, and asked if any of them had been able to get any information from any federal or state officials on any of these questions, and all of them -- from Australian TV to local Fox affiliates -- complained of an unorganized, non-communicative mess. One cameraman told me, "As someone who's been here in this camp for two days, the only information I can give you is this: Get out by nightfall. You don't want to be here at night."

There was also no visible attempt by any of those running the camp to set up any sort of transparent and consistent system, for instance lines for the buses, ways to register contact information or find family members, special needs services for children and infirm, phone services, treatment for possible disease exposure, or even a single trash can.

To understand the dimensions of this tragedy, it's important to look at New Orleans itself.

For those who have not lived in New Orleans, you have missed an incredible, glorious, vital city, a place with a culture and energy unlike anywhere else in the world. A 70 percent African-American city with a generous, subversive and unique culture of vivid beauty. From jazz, blues and hip-hop, to secondlines, Mardi Gras Indians, parades, beads, jazz funerals, and red beans and rice on Monday nights, New Orleans is a place of art and music and dance and sexuality and liberation unlike anywhere else in the world.

It is a city of kindness and hospitality, where walking down the block can take two hours because you stop and talk to someone on every porch, and where a community pulls together when someone is in need. It is a city of extended families and social networks filling the gaps left by city, state and federal governments that have abdicated their responsibility for the public welfare. It is a city where someone you walk past on the street not only asks how you are, they wait for an answer.

It is also a city of exploitation and segregation and fear. The city of New Orleans has a population of just over 500,000 and was expecting 300 murders this year, most of them centered in just a few -- overwhelmingly black -- neighborhoods. Police have been quoted as saying that they don't need to search out the perpetrators, because usually a few days after a shooting, the attacker is shot in revenge.