ray nagin was RIGHT

by jackie sheeler on September 5, 2006

new orleans mayor ray nagin said “You guys in new york can’t get a hole in the ground fixed, and it’s five years later. So let’s be fair.”

and oh, boy, did he have to pay for that statement. i read in yesterday’s daily news how nagin came to nyc to visit the site and leave a memento and apologize to the families and so forth.

but you know what? he is RIGHT. and to a large extent, the families of the victims who were so outraged at nagin’s comment are responsible for this inexcusable delay. the squabbling over lawsuits and memorials is what has held up progress on this project, not a lack of funds or manpower, as is the case in new orleans. let’s face it, the federal government couldn’t give a damn if the 9th ward is never rebuilt — it’s not “their kind of people” who lived there, you know — and though it’s been widely acknowledged that the FEMA handling of the disaster was in itself a disaster almost as large as katrina herself, few amends have been made. oh, right, the first lady opened a library there, donated some books. thanks. now how about giving all those displaced residents a dry, non-toxic place to sit and read them? but no, it’s all on nagin’s back — and new orleans has never been known as a money city. its police department, for example, was the lowest paid in the nation, and i really can’t blame the new orleans cops who walked off the job when they saw that the federal cavalry wasn’t coming any time soon and that the damage inflicted by the hurricane, and the sheer volume of the stranded and the surviving was too big to manage. many of the officers — who had themselves lost homes or family members, let’s not forget — just headed for the hills. sometimes, context is everything.

so, in the context of not getting an almost completely destroyed city back in order after one year, with virtually no useful help from the federal government, nagin makes an entirely reasonable comment about nyc’s failure to rebuild on the WTC site in five years. and HE IS RIGHT.

we still have survivor families — some of which received a million or more dollars in either insurance or “hush money” (in exchange for agreements not to sue the city/port authority/et al) sniffing around for more. we have funds set up to increase the already-bloated (imho) memorial fund.

but we don’t have money to provide medical treatment to the thousands of WTC site cleanup workers who are now suffering a variety of life-threatening (and already, in some cases, fatal) symptoms of respiratory and other diseases directly related to the cleanup efforts. the workers were lied to at the time, they were told it was safe, many were not even issued so much as a surgical mask. but the survivors — and, it seems, much of the city — is far more concerned with the memorial than with the human lives that are now in danger due to these same attacks. more than a little hypocritical, wouldn’t you say?

mayor nagin, you were right. and i’m sorry that politics forced you to come here and apologize for a statement that was so, so true.