Love in the ruins

Twice last winter, I flew across the country from San Francisco to the Mississippi coast, to visit my girlfriend in Biloxi. She was working with people whose lives were pretty much ruined by Hurricane Katrina. And, she stayed there a long time, three-plus months. Thanks largely to her efforts, some of the poorest residents in East Biloxi were able to move out of the ruins of crushed houses or leaky tents into trailers she somehow wheedled out of one of our worst national bureaucracies, FEMA.

Now, she is back down there. FEMA, meanwhile, has formed a special investigative force to discover whether some people may be occupying trailers without the proper "documentation," i.e., they are unable to prove they meet FEMA's criteria for living in a trailer. The agency's goal is to boot these people back out into the streets.

That this is outrageous is obvious. My friend, as regular readers know, has since broken up with me, partly so she can be free to stay down there on a long-term basis and help her clients. It appears that the victories she won for some of them were short-term, now that Orwellian agencies like FEMA (a division of "Homeland Security") is actively on the hunt to blame the victims of Katrina for their fate.

What am I, a writer, supposed to do at this juncture? My former girlfriend and I are trying to find an outlet for a piece we have co-authored about this situation, but the editors I know tell me that no one much cares anymore about the Gulf Coast's predicament any longer. Can that be true?

If anyone has any ideas, please contact me. I will probably post a version of our article here in the next few days, once I see whether any of my contacts in larger outlets are interested in publishing what we have written.

This is a perfect example of the dilemma of progressive journalists in America throughout my lifetime. Does our voice really matter?

The answer is no longer blowing in the wind. The answer is splattered lifeless in the dead trees all along the ruined coast of Mississippi.