new orleans article | ADHD Information

great quote kidd.. do you know what zimmerman wrote it in context to?? About twenty five years ago, barely out of my teens, I moved to New Orleans where I found a job as a delivery driver for Coca-Cola in Gretna, which is just across the Mississippi River. I delivered soft-drinks all over the city, from the French Quarter to the New Orleans housing projects.

The projects were a dangerous place for a white man. On the Coke truck, the practice called for a white driver to recruit a black coworker to ride shotgun. If the criminals in the projects saw the black man, the white driver was safe. If a white driver went in alone, he stood a good chance of being robbed and the truck cleaned out.

New Orleans has been a city in trouble for a very long time. When I arrived there as a young man, my liberal Minnesota upbringing prepared me to believe that the root cause of the city's problems was poverty and racism. But the direct experience of the city revealed a much bigger problem - an ethic of government dependency and a political spoils systems that bred selfishness and corruption.

Call it what you will - The Great Society, the War on Poverty, the welfare state -- we saw the great socialist experiment that started in the 1960s come crashing down when Hurricane Katrina roared into New Orleans. The Great Society was ostensibly created to help the poor, but has in fact institutionalized poverty with the most devastating consequences reserved for the poor themselves.

The blame game is on, led by the Angry Left. They follow Gramsci's dictum: progress is incremental; if you cannot win the hearts and minds of the people by reason, then attack the moral credibility of your opponent. It's an old trick that has proved effective in the past but is slowly losing steam. The quick and generous aid of many American gives lie to the charge that America is a racist nation. And the spectacle of blacks preying on blacks in the Superdome and on the streets of New Orleans gives the lie to the idea that blacks constitute a monolithic "community" and that people like Rev. Jesse Jackson or Rev. Al Sharpton speak for them all.

Hurricane Katrina is a test of the moral character of our nation. The argument about where blame should be laid is only superficially a question about responsibility. On a deeper level it involves how the anarchy and suffering witnessed by the American people should be understood and perceived. Americans are being forced to ask if the failure in New Orleans is testimony to the culture-destroying initiatives of the Great Society, or is it due to not enough government intervention. Is the response to the civic breakdown more political involvement in the affairs of the community, or has the intrusion contributed to the disorder?

In answering that question Americans need to consider that contemporary liberalism has an increasingly intolerant, even totalitarian reach. New Orleans revealed the plight of many inner cities. Law enforcement can be arbitrary and often feared by the people it is supposed to protect. Education of the poor is a national disgrace despite the billions poured into inner city schools. Social policy is geared toward the destruction of the two parent family rather than its preservation. Racial demagogues preach a gospel of victimization that erodes the necessary self-dignity and self-confidence needed to rise above poverty.

Keeping the poor in poverty was not the intention when the great socialist experiment began with Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, but the widespread belief that motives rather than consequences justify ideas keeps the destructive policies in place. The belief plays on the goodwill that rests deep in the American character. When Americans hear the moral appeal to help the poor embedded in yet another Big Government prescription, many support it with little reflection.

Angry recriminations will fill the air, commissions will be convened, and bureaucracies will be reshuffled. Politicians will compete to see who can spend more billions on new social programs to "cure" what ails New Orleans. The shrill demagoguery from the Angry Left will increase, and the Democratic Party may lurch even further to the left as its leadership clutches more desperately to the power they sense is eroding.

New Orleans and Katrina will change this country. It will give more definition to that deep unease about the direction of this nation that many Americans have felt since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. What remains to be seen is whether the American people, when faced with the same old failed solutions, will finally say - enough.

Who wrote this? What he writes about the New Orleans housing projects, better known as the 9th Ward, is true, and it was these people who ended up at the Convention Center. When I heard about the violence that ensued there, I was not surprised, though the reporters who did not understand the 9th Ward seemed mortified. These reporters didn't understand that the people of the 9th Ward lived with that kind of violence on a daily basis. It has always been appalling, but Katrina put it out there for the world to see, for the world to understand what kind of hell the desperately poor in New Orleans have had to deal with for years.

And, yes, in New Orleans, poverty became institutionalized. The stereotypical portrayal of generational welfare, a portrayal that is not held true by welfare statistics (the vast majority of people on welfare only stay on it for a couple of years), was true in New Orleans, and it was not helped by the fact that most jobs were so low paying that getting off welfare was not attractive. My stepsister was a federal probation officer in New Orleans for fifteen years, and she always said that the welfare system in New Orleans did its best to keep poor people poor, to make sure that "there would be poor always."

I have no idea what the future holds for these people, but I do believe this horrible storm may give some of them their chance to "rise above." I sure hope so.

"Imagine all the people, living life in peace, you may say I'm a dreamer..."

lillian38612.8540972222

Brookelea,

Thanks for the article. Pretty educational for me. I really knew very little about New Orleans with the exception that there were a lot of poor people. Sad that it took an aussie to teach me about my own country.

I feel a little ashamed I have been thinking these people better get their butts out looking for jobs but if they are generational welfare recipients then how can I expect they are going to change their thinking. Pretty stupid of me.

YUP.kidd, you crack me up!!! i'm reading about aussie cultery hoarders and thinking 'what the!!'..

thanks for finding the poem..

He was refering to a group of displaced nomadic Australians who roam the streets of New York City armed to the teeth with silverware they stole while rifling through peoples drawers looking for booty, nakedy pictures and pieces of eights. A great pandemic of silverware related injuries plauged the city in the early 1960's and became critical after Mr Zimmerman's near fatal run in with a gang armed with spoons and nakedy pictures of Jackie Gleason's butt inspired him to warn the world with a song he recorded, prompting city officials to launch an investigation that culminated in the deportation of all Australians from New York to concentration camps throughout the mid-Western states and Canada.

oh wait...that was a dream I had.

He wrote it in context to the experiences he had when he first arrived in New York and was trying to get into the music buisness. It was titled 'Talkin' New York City Blues'. One verse says;

I got a harmonica job and began to play,

blowin' my lungs out for a dollar a day.

I blowed inside out and upside down,

the man there said he loved my sound...

he was ravin' about it he loved my sound...a dollar a days worth.

A long time ago agreat man once said,

that some folks will rob you with a fountain pen.

It didn't to long to find out,

just what he was talikin' about....

You see, alot of people don't have any food on there table...

but they got alot of forks and knives, and they gotta cut somethin'

That is so true Brookleigh.

It isn't just in NO though. It is in every major city and many rural areas. The statistics mislead because they say people went to work and got off but they don't tell you how many of them had to quit their jobs and go back on because Welfare would support their families and minimum wage jobs couldn't.

Unfortunately, a minimum wage job won't even cover the rent on a decent home for a small family. It might barely cover utilities in winter if you don't pay the rent and don't feed your family nutritiously.

I know what I am talking about. I was a single mom in a rural area for years and couldn't get anything that paid over minimum wage. I know people in this rural area with Masters degrees who are making less than an hr today.

No one mentions the statistics of how many get off but can't stay off, or if they do, they get evicted eventually because they chose to pay the heat bill in February, then still had the heat turned off during a blizzard in April because they couldn't pay the full amount each month. No one talks about that.

I had some jobs where people actually thought I was making money, where I carried a lot of responsibility and was highly thought of but couldn't pay the basic bills and my kid and I wore hand me downs because I couldn't even afford the Salvation Army prices.

When there are more people looking for work than there is work to be had, minimum wage prevails and welfare rises. We need to bring jobs back from over seas so US citizens can find jobs and employers have to pay a living wage because there are other jobs out there.

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Amen to that!

the same thing is happening here too.. call centre jobs have moved overseas, mainly to india and that alone stripped tens of thousands of ppl out of jobs..

our minimum wage is much higher, health care is pretty much free, and if you are receiving unemployment benefits, prescription medicines only cost between around .50 - .00

higher education used to be free but now they charge, its around 00 per year for a science degree.. most ppl will be paying these debts off for many years.. its an interest free debt that you owe the government and you pay it off through your taxes when you start earning more than ,000.. but there are no real jobs out there.. even teaching jobs are scarce.. the government might never get their money back!!

having said that, we too have a generational welfare mentality and the government is intent on changing that.. whether they are going about it the right way is another issue..

"A lot of people don't have any food on their table. But they got alot of forks and knives, and they gotta cut something".- (R. Zimmerman) KIDD_ROCK444438613.3616087963