Living Like a Refugee

thenation: Nearly a week out of New Orleans now, we sit in our friends' living room and watch as our city is dismembered. Neighbors in this small town stop by with clothes, a bicycle for our daughter, a scooter for my son. We meet them at the front door as CNN's cameras pan across the faces of our dying neighbors.

Being a middle-class, white New Orleanian meant being constantly reminded of poverty. Unlike some other cities, New Orleans had no major geographical boundaries between wealth and ghetto; the city was an economic, racial and cultural patchwork. I never imagined those distinctions would someday dictate who would live and who would die.

A French Quarter bar manager named Bigfoot rode out Hurricane Katrina in the Iberville Project, the substandard public housing development that many of the French Quarter's waiters and busboys, dishwashers and maids called home.

He writes on his blog (www.livejournal.com/users/interdictor) that attempts by Iberville residents to flag down police resulted in guns being aimed. Here's what else he says: "The people are so desperate that they're doing anything they can think of to impress the authorities enough to bring some buses. These things include standing in single-file lines with the elderly in front, women and children next; sweeping up the area and cleaning the windows and anything else that would show the people are not barbarians. The buses never stop." Read more