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A Must-Read

Jill

This story made me cry:

In the chaos that was Causeway Boulevard, this group of refugees stood out: a 6-year-old boy walking down the road, holding a 5-month-old, surrounded by five toddlers who followed him around as if he were their leader.

They were holding hands. Three of the children were about 2 years old, and one was wearing only diapers. A 3-year-old girl, who wore colorful barrettes on the ends of her braids, had her 14-month-old brother in tow. The 6-year-old spoke for all of them, and he told rescuers his name was Deamonte Love.

Thousands of human stories have flown past relief workers in the last week, but few have touched them as much as the seven children who were found wandering together Thursday at an evacuation point in downtown New Orleans. In the Baton Rouge headquarters of the rescue operation, paramedics tried to coax their names out of them; nurses who examined them stayed up that night, brooding.

Transporting the children alone was “the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life, knowing that their parents are either dead” or that they had been abandoned, said Pat Coveney, a Houston emergency medical technician who put them into the back of his ambulance and drove them out of New Orleans.

“It goes back to the same thing,” he said. “How did a 6-year-old end up being in charge of six babies?”

Read the whole thing.

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12 thoughts on A Must-Read

  1. When I first read the story they had not found the parents yet. It is wonderful that they did find them, I fear that others will not be reunited.

  3. If they make a movie out of this, I’m going to kill someone.

    If? You have doubts about this happening?

    Isn’t it the nature of the popular/commercial infotainment media based in Hollywood/NY to exploit that kernel of hope in the midst of a tragedy that something like this represents?

    Of course, they’ll have to make some changes (ages, ethnicity, that sort of thing). And it might take them a couple months to work it into their fall schedules. (Or maybe spring?)

  4. Doesn’t it just make you crazy? Imagine being one of the parents who had to make the decision to put their kids on the first helicopter beause there wasn’t room for everyone. I’d do the same thing, but I’d be pretty torn-up about it. To make it worse, they end up getting separated from their kids.

    It’s a miracle that those kids survived. That kid managed to do what the entire Bush administration was unwilling or unable to do: keep people alive and get them out.

    Oh, and if they make a movie out of anything, it’ll be about the two British girls who made it out of the Superdome.

  5. This makes all the other crap that we focus on
    TOO much of the time seem so selfish, so foolish. Taking care of our own should be our top priorty.

    In my job and in other parts of my life I see too many children who have not been given the care they need and deserve because of the god-damned choices their parents have made. It makes me sick.

    God bless these parents who put their childrens’ needs before their own and who, by the grace of caring people, got the kids back where they belong. We need more responsible, caring parents like them.

  6. I can certainly understand why the mothers, at first, had a hard time deciding what to do. I’m sure they worried about the helicopter really coming back, who would take care of their babies on the other end and would they ever see their kids again if they were to let them go.

    That last minute decision was a huge leap of faith and trust. I would not want to be put in that situation at all. Ever.

    Having said that, I second Louise’s last paragraph:
    God bless these parents who put their childrens’ needs before their own and who, by the grace of caring people, got the kids back where they belong. We need more responsible, caring parents like them.

  7. Terrance links to a site that seems to excuse rapists because they happen to be black and therefore, I guess, not animals like white rapists might be described. WTF?

  8. Here’s how it goes:

    1) There are rumors of rapes in a distressed town with a heavily black population
    2) Conservatives assume that the rumors, as they involve black people, must be true
    3) Others point out that the rumors are, just possibly, rumors rather than findings of guilt in established courts of law
    4) Conservatives accuse those people of racism

  9. I read the post Terrance linked to. I re-read it. I failed to see any “excuse” for rapists there. What on earth are you talking about, Karol?

    There was some unintentional (I guess) humor in the line about protecting them from terrifying rumors. Someone’s got earplugs? A Walkman, ‘scuse me, mp3 player?

    And why is it considered a solution to leave everybody else imprisoned there with all those thugs? (That’s a rhetorical question; I’m afraid I know the answer.)

  10. I’m going to answer your rhetorical question, Ron.

    Because Karol, like so many other conservatives, seems not to give fuck one about thugs hurting Black folks. It’s only when they start to target whites that any sort of problem arises. Living in fear and being victimized is, to Karol and her fellow travelers, the natural condition of the racial minority and thus not to be noticed.

    This is adaptive behavior on their parts, because to notice the condition in which such people live would take all the enjoyment out of their precious tax cuts. If they had to think of the body count associated with their uptick in income, they might not enjoy their Fisrt-Class upgrade as much. And that would be wrong.

  11. Terrance links to a site that seems to excuse rapists because they happen to be black and therefore, I guess, not animals like white rapists might be described. WTF?

    Huh? He linked to his own post, in which he noted that black people were being described as heathen savages. In that post, he linked to several other posts in which the racism is made more explicit. The British girls in their party of white hotel guests were written not as a group of hurricane survivors in with a large number of other hurricane survivors, but as a group of terrified white people in with an undifferentiated mass of predatory blacks. “Animals” refers to black men. The possibility of white rapists didn’t enter anyone’s heads. No one tried to admit any vulnerable black women or children into the circle of protection that was formed around the British girls. No one intimated that white male hotel guests might take advantage of the confusion. This is an example of how class and race impact health and safety. The British girls were given special treatment because they were white, relatively wealthy, and not from New Orleans.

  12. Yep, I read it again, too, and it seems Karol did what a lot of white people do: assume whomever we are reading about is white like us.

    The paragraph in question seems to be this one:

    Nice that they were not only fortunate enough to have menfolk willing to spend the night vigilantly protecting their womanhood from the animals running amok in the Superdome, but also to get better accomodations than the rest of the…uh…non-British folks crammed in to the Superdome, and get priority consideration for evacuation.

    No where in all of those links does it state it’s white men being called “animals.” Often, when this term is used, it’s referring to black (and sometimes hispanic/latino) men. Period. It’s most often what they’ve been compared to throughout our history.

    Given the author of the post linked and the subject, it’s very clearly satire – or sarcasm if you will.

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