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Corpses Floating in the Waters of Despair (Part one) - New Orleans to Lāhainā
Story and photo By KEITH MCHENRY
I received a call from a woman in Texas asking if Food Not Bombs could provide meals at the newly formed Camp Casey, so named for the son of Cindy Sheehan, who was killed in Iraq. I didn’t hesitate. Two days later my 1979 blue school bus was full of food and volunteers and off we went heading east from Tucson.
As soon as I opened the door of the Crawford Peace House, activist Lisa Fithian enthusiastically welcomed me. She explained that they were setting up a new camp and asked me to help her lure the growing vigil outside the entrance to Bush’s ranch away to a field out of sight of the main gate. “We even have a refrigerator truck that you can use.”
The Crawford Peace House was already swarming with FBI infiltrators pretending to be peace activists. The feds stuffed themselves in a room behind a magic marker-made sign taped to the door saying, “No Photos Allowed.”
A guide hopped on my bus to show us the way. We passed the camp outside the entrance to Bush’s summer home, glided across the rolling hills for another thirty minutes. A giant white circus tent rose into view. The promised refrigerator truck and thousands of dollars of rented tables, chairs and sound system were already in place. There was just one person setting out some chairs.
Upon seeing the camp, my bus passengers were united. We rejected this new site and turned back to the main gate. On our return to Camp Casey, a roar of cheers from the protesters greeted us. A couple who I would learn were Cindy Sheehan’s attorneys mobilized the clearing of an area between several tents next to theirs.”We would love it if you set up the kitchen here.”
Chiggers were already gnawing at my legs as I spoke with Cindy Sheehan’s legal support at the entrance to President George Bush's Crawford, Texas Ranch.
Cindy had left for an emergency in California and the FBI was taking advantage of her absence. Her legal team, the Smarts, and I became fast friends as they too could see the strategy of the government and appreciated that I stood my ground refusing to comply.
The Smarts had come up to Crawford from New Orleans to support the protest against the war in Iraq. One night, as we visited around our campfire, they shared news from home. Their daughter’s grandmother expressed concern about Hurricane Katrina.
Katrina, in fact, ravaged the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005. The following day, the Veteran’s For Peace bus provided me with access to their satellite internet connection. I designed a www.foodnotbombs.net/katrina.html and shared it on social media and emailed the link to as many Food Not Bombs chapters as possible, encouraging groups to collect rice, beans and other supplies to take to New Orleans and the other destroyed communities.
Cindy returned from California and formally closed Camp Casey so we could focus on Katrina. Oddly, that same day Lisa Fithian offered me $10,000 if I would take my bus north to Washington DC to participate in a rally. Instead, I gathered up my Tucson friends and we rushed back to Arizona to regroup.
As I was rushing towards Tucson, an old acquaintance of mine from my work with political prisoner support, Malik Rahim, emailed requesting I post a call out for help. He had a place in the Angola District where relief volunteers could gather and find directions on where help was needed most. I let him know I had already uploaded a Katrina webpage and would be sending a bus full of supplies and volunteers his way.
Another acquaintance of mine, Scott Crow and his friend Brandon Darby, were among those helping Malik start the Common Grounds Collective. Brandon Darby would announce he was an FBI infiltrator.
Malik Rahim, on Democracy Now! claimed to be "heartbroken" at the revelation that Darby was an FBI informant. He also expressed regret at all the women who left Common Ground Relief due to Darby's behavior during his time at the organization, including claims that he sexually assaulted female organizers.
In Tucson, I took my Bluebird bus to my local mechanic to do a thorough check-up because I was going to send it to New Orleans and couldn’t risk any breakdowns. My friend Lee and I sat in my tiny one room adobe house systematically calling each local Food City Grocery from my landline to see if they would donate. The managers were eager to help and before long they were wheeling shopping cart loads of dry goods out to my bus filling the back half with provisions.
I wheeled my bus to North 7th Avenue parking next to Anza Park. Friends had gathered on the grass with their contributions. We stuffed the last of the donations into the remaining spaces in the back half and hugged each of those joining the rescue effort. I passed on the keys to the bus to Walt Staton and Professor Randall Amster, gave them a couple thousands dollars we had raised for gas, and expenses and wished them well.
Lee and I returned to our makeshift coordination office. The calls were flooding in from people who read our Katrina website. A bus planned to leave out of Seattle with a crew. People from Boston, Chicago, Memphis and Denver called. Sisters of the Road in Minnesota offered support. Food Not Bombs activists from Florida who had survived past hurricanes were eager to help.
I jotted down the names and phone numbers in a spiral notebook. One page for people on the western side of the United States, another for those in the mountain states, a sheet for the midwest and another for the east. Patrick at the Food Not Bombs group in Houston agreed to be a rendezvous site for those traveling from the west. We secured an office in Baton Rouge with a local environmental group where our midwest drivers could stop in for final directions; Veterans for Peace and Food Not Bombs had a camp in Covington, Louisiana where our Florida volunteers could hook up for instructions. Cell phones were not so common in 2005 so prearranged meeting sites were essential.
Photos and video of bloated corpses floating in the tides surrounding the Superdome briefly appeared in the media. Families waving sheets from the rooftops of their homes and dead bodies left to rot that were blipped across TV screens stunned the world.
On Sept. 6, 2005, I got a call from Dan of Hartford Food Not Bombs. He reported that their bus was stopped at a military checkpoint north of New Orleans. Those staffing the blockade told Dan he needed a letter granting permission to pass so I made stationary, wrote a letter and emailed him a pdf. He made a copy at the Baton Rouge office, returned to the checkpoint, showed my letter and it worked letting the Hartford bus travel south to New Orleans. I posted a copy on our website so everyone could use it to pass the blockades.
The first calls each day rattled my landline to life before sunrise. I would only stop taking calls long enough to dial up my modem to post updates on the Katrina web page or access Google Maps.
Another call, this time came from a man telling me that he was standing up to his waist in toxic Mississippi River water. He was seeking directions to our meals. He could see a street sign. I looked up his location on the Google Maps page that I had left open for just this purpose. “Walk three blocks east and when you get to Divine Street, walk seven blocks down and we are on the left.”
A New Orleans City Councilwoman called to ask where we were distributing food. She started calling each Monday for the latest. One morning she expressed frustration at the city having to deploy police to defend their communication's tower from the National Guard and Blackwater Security when they snipped the cables to the emergency management broadcasting antenna. I guess she needed to vent.
A young man who introduced himself as Tommy from Port Arthur, Texas called me a week after we set up camp in Jackson Square. “Mr McHenry I am so sorry we failed you. We tried to land our boat load of supplies on the levees but we were out gunned by the National Guard. We tried to shoot our way onto the dikes but we were out of ammunition after five hours.” I thanked him for his effort and suggested he return to Port Angeles and we would send a truck to meet them. Fire fights with the military aren’t generally in the spirit of Food Not Bombs but in those circumstances, all I could do was encourage them to bring the supplies by land.
That same week, several of our volunteers were still busy using axes to make escape holes through people’s attics to free those who were trapped. FEMA finally arrived with a token amount of Meals-Ready-To-Eat so we fed them, food they didn’t want to eat themselves. My dear Rainbow bus friend Felipe joined us with his Kid's Village kitchen. There were weeks when church groups would pull in to help.
The government and relief corporations were of little help. Michael Brown, the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency was mocked and President Bush’s quote, “Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job,” became the butt of jokes on late night talk shows.
The radio stations blasted requests to donate to the American Red Cross. A giant banner asking shoppers to donate to the Red Cross hung across the facade of my local grocery. I asked, Felipe, Walt and Randall if they ever saw the Red Cross, but they reported they never showed to New Orleans.
The Red Cross did commandeer the Astrodome in Houston but they were unable to provide the food needed to help the thousands who showed up. Patrick, Nick and the others with Houston Food Not Bombs set up a daily meal outside.
The stadium was chaos. To help families reconnect, we set up a low-watt pirate radio station and organized a nationwide call for donations of transistor radios and batteries. It wasn’t long before people were denouncing the Red Cross over our radio station causing the agency to close us down.
The calls continued to storm in from desperate people wading through the streets of New Orleans and neighboring communities. We had a kitchen in Waveland, Mississippi and other volunteers helped Veterans for Peace in Covington, Louisiana.
An Arizona man with a large panel truck pulled into my little adobe once every few weeks to collect another load of donations. A family in Germany shipped boxes of clothing and chocolate bars. He unloaded our gifts at the Common Ground staging area, packed his truck with his mother's paintings and returned to Arizona. As soon as he unloaded the art, he was back at my place. A towering pile of clothing and supplies filled my carport. At times I had to stack boxes on the roof. Two rescue workers were joking that New Orleans had the best dressed hungry people in America.
The calls for help continued to pour in from sunrise to past midnight for eight months. The Red Cross and FEMA provided nearly no help. According to news reports at the time, the Red Cross raised over one billion five hundred million dollars and when confronted about not using it to help the survivors, they told the media that they needed to save it for future crises.
When I was working on an article about Katrina, I discovered testimony before the Louisiana State Legislature that explained that the reason the flood victims were ignored had been intentional. Public statements by State and Federal officials made it clear they planned to use the disaster to force property owners to sell their land for pennies on the dollar so the city could be converted into a kind of New Orleans Jazz Theme Park, in effect starving the poor black community out and replacing them with more wealthy residents. Their plan failed in part because of the success of mutual aid groups like the Common Ground Collective, Food Not Bombs, the Rainbow buses, Veterans For Peace and random church groups who kept the survivors of Katrina fed and supported.
Like what we saw in Katrina, there was a repeat of these failures in the tragic Lāhainā fires. Lahaina fire survivor Christine Borge, below, angrily spoke at the Aug. 22, before the council members at the Maui County Council meeting held in the Kalana O Maui Building. Her moving 3-minute testimony ties so much about this together.
The Hawaii Sate Department of Education has reported that 2,025 students remain unaccounted for in the Lāhainā public school system. - August 29, 2023. There is a real possibility that we will learn that there is a 9/11 Trade Tower amount of deaths in Maui.
Food Not Bombs is holding a presentation on the crisis on Monday, Sept. 11 at the Downtown Library starting at 4:30 in the second floor meeting hall.
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