'O God, I thank you that I am not like the rest of humanity . . .'

And if you were wondering what the previous post about Louisiana 1970 has to do with anything concerning America 2006 . . . keep reading. And it's not always purely a matter of black and white. Here's part of a Sunday article in The (Baton Rouge, La.) Advocate about the city's perception -- and reception -- of Katrina evacuees from New Orleans:

But 51-year-old Charlotte McGee, a New Orleans evacuee now living in FEMA’s Renaissance Village trailer park, still bristles at the mayor’s initial comment.

“When your black mayor, who looks like me, makes racist comments, it hurts,” she said. “He doesn’t want us here, and now no one does.”

For the evacuees of the costliest hurricane in American history, the past year has been a crash course on how to radically adapt to new homes, jobs and schools.

They desperately cling to and still defend the reputation of their native city. Some feel persecuted, blamed for crime in Baton Rouge.

“I’ve read about racism, I’ve heard people talk about it, but I never saw it,” McGee said. “It hurts me to the core. You hate me because I am black, because I am from the city of New Orleans. I am not an illegal alien. I am your neighbor. I am an American.”

Margaret Chopin, a 56-year-old from Gentilly, said that on a recent trip to Wal-Mart she heard a group of people talking about how the “good blacks have to suffer for the bad blacks from New Orleans.”

It’s the kind of comment that might rub nerves raw. But Chopin, who said she’s been insulted repeatedly the past 15 months, chooses to pray instead.

“Usually I don’t say anything,” said Chopin, who lives in Renaissance Village. “I don’t want to be ignorant like them. I pray, I thank God for what I do have.”

Chopin said the perception that the evacuees are simply criminals overrunning Baton Rouge is wrong.

“That’s how everybody thinks up here,” Chopin said. “Some of us are professionals. I have a bachelor’s degree in political science, but you don’t hear about those people. Sure, more people is more crime, but is it us? Is it the evacuees? No.”

Unlike McGee and Chopin, 38-year-old Percy Clennon did not spend weeks of sleepless nights inside the River Center. He spent them sleeping on the floor with his wife at a relative’s home in Old South Baton Rouge.

Clennon knew the move would be tough but didn’t expect to be treated harshly in the food stamp line and at grocery stores. More than a year later, the dirty looks and nasty comments persist, he said.

“Where’s the Southern hospitality?” asks Clennon, who is from the Third Ward of New Orleans. “I am shocked. I didn’t think my own race would treat me this way. I am not racist, but I thought the white people would have been doing this. In the end I actually got more love and support from them.”

And there's this from Bob Herbert's New York Times column:

BATON ROUGE, LA. -- They look for all the world like internment camps. The long rows of identical white trailers sit on flat, grim, barren expanses of land that are enclosed by metal fences. Armed guards are stationed at the entrances around the clock.

More than a year after the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina, thousands of the poorest victims from New Orleans still are living in these trailer parks run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. They have ironic names, like Mount Olive Gardens and Renaissance Village. A more accurate name would be Camp Depression, after the state of mind of most of the residents.

The "parks" are nothing more than vast, dusty, gravel-strewn lots filled with trailers that were designed to be hitched to cars for brief vacations or weekend getaways. The trailers, about 200 square feet each, were never meant to serve as homes for entire families. But in these FEMA parks, it's common for families of five or six, or even more, to be jammed into one trailer.

I stood outside a trailer at the Mount Olive encampment last Monday afternoon, talking with Geraldine Craig and her 21-yearold daughter, Danielle Craig. The women, who have been unable to find jobs, seemed baffled and depleted by their long ordeal. As we talked, Danielle's 2-year-old son, Javonta, scampered around in the dust and gravel.

Danielle's daughter, Miracle, was 5 months old when Katrina struck. The baby was ill and receiving oxygen when it became clear that the family had to evacuate. "The doctors were taking care of her, and she couldn't hardly breathe," Danielle said. "After we left, we ended up in a shelter. I said that my baby needed oxygen, but they told us we had to wait.

"They finally sent us to a medical building, and they put her on oxygen for about two hours. But the doctor said there was nothing wrong with her."

Like so many thousands of others left destitute and all but despondent by Katrina, the family moved on - to Texas, back to Louisiana, eventually to Baton Rouge. It was too much for Miracle, who never got the proper medical treatment. She died last March. Her heart disease wasn't accurately diagnosed until an autopsy was performed.

(snip)

[Irwin] Redlener, the author of "Americans at Risk: Why We Are Not Prepared for Megadisasters and What We Can Do," said he was outraged that so many thousands of the poorest victims of Hurricane Katrina are still stuck in limbo - unable to find jobs or permanent housing, denied adequate medical and educational services and with no idea when, or if, they will be able to return to New Orleans.

"The recovery of this catastrophe in the Gulf has been as badly mangled by the government as the initial response," Redlener said. "Fifteen months have gone by, and you still have these thousands of people who in essence are either American refugees living in other states who have no idea what's going to happen to them, or they are living in these trailer camps or in isolated trailers on their old property, which has been destroyed. They're just waiting for something to happen. And the wait is interminable."

Geraldine Craig said: "We just recently went down to New Orleans, and they got nothing going yet, not in our neighborhood. So we're going to be here a while."

The residents of Mount Olive Gardens and the even larger trailer camp at Renaissance Village in nearby Baker, La., face challenges that seem almost insurmountable. Even minimum wage jobs are very difficult to find and difficult to get to because there is little public transportation. Many of the residents are elderly, disabled or illiterate. Some are mentally handicapped.

See, America's racial cesspool is just a manifestation of a much larger human problem: We think it's quite acceptable to throw some people away. In our affluent American society, we find it easy to throw people away because they're the "wrong" color . . . or class.

In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina swept tens of thousands of people into the Baton Rouge area from "the slums of New Orleans." At least that's how New Orleans was perceived when I was a child in Louisiana's capital city. To folks like my mother, "New Orleans" always required the modifier "da slums a."

"Da slums a Noo Orluns."

Looks like things down there haven't changed so much in the past four decades.

Oh, that everyone were light, bright and had never been near a slum! (Especially "Da slums a Noo Orluns.") How happy we'd all be then!

But if everyone were wealthy, brilliant, suave, debonair and had never done anything unseemly in his or her entire life . . . he or she would hardly be human. Jesus Christ never would have had to be born of Mary -- or sacrificed at Calvary -- and we wouldn't be celebrating Christmas in a few days.

We'd be celebrating our eternal UberHumanity in the Garden of Eden. Eternally.

But that's not how it has all worked out for us, has it? We needed that first Christmas Day, and we needed that first Good Friday, too. And that first Easter Sunday sealed the deal . . . that we might have hope despite our status as hopeless screw-ups.

If "those people" are screwed up beyond all telling, guess what. You are, too.

And if they're screwed up, you're screwed up and I'm screwed up, I guess that makes us all in this together, sorely in need of being washed clean by the blood of the Lamb of God.

But we as Christians can't remember our dignity. Nor can we remember our neighbor's. And the government can't remember anybody's.

Which is a sad damn commentary as we prepare to celebrate the birth of the little God-Man, Jesus, who was born to die as the perfect Passover sacrifice so that death wouldn't be the Final Answer for a bunch of schmucks such as ourselves.