...by the sound of it, with good reason.
Anne Rice has written an eloquent and strongly worded opinion piece about the events in New Orleans post-Katrina. Rice has not only been a long-term resident of The Big Easy, but has also set the majority of her fiction there and has researched the history of the city in depth. It's her loving descriptions of New Orleans that in part that had added to my desire to want visit it some day.
[Link via towleroad.]
3 comments:
I was reluctant to read her piece for some reason, but I'm glad I did. You can feel her love for New Orleans and you can feel her controlled anger.
Foremost, this is a massive tragedy beyond my ken. Half a million people are displaced. They say over 300,000 homes are shattered or will be beyond repair.
Like Anne mentions, though, it has also served to illuminate racism in this country once again. Too many times over the last week I've heard some awful bigoted shit from people who I thought knew better. Seriously, I've been stunned. I have more faults than you'd care to count, but one of them is not to suffer these fools. I'm sure I've lost business this week from folks I've confronted. At a time like this when people should realize, like Anne says, that we are all the same, instead all this hate bubbles up?
I guess I don't have a coherent point, buddy, but thanks for listening.
I think we're on the same sort of wavelength on this dude. I was originally holding off posting about Katrina because I didn't feel informed enough and I couldn't coherently form just one opinion. It sure has exposed the attitudes on both sides of the economic/cultural divide, and really highlighted that America is not the classless society that many folks would like to believe. I've seen lots of victim blaming already, when the reality was that lots of those folks had no way of leaving.
I applaud Anne for such a passionate plea. It was through Anne's books that i learned about New Orleans and because of her that I went there several times over the year. I am so glad I was inspired then to see New Orleans, just as I am inpsired now to help New Orleans.
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