Post Katrina - Still Missing the Missing

Those of us who live beyond the wrecked boundries of the Gulf Coast have moved on. Mardi Gras was fun to watch on CNN. A damn sight better than watching bloated bodies cooking in the post-hurricane heat, or rotting in the tepid, infested water that stood in New Orleans East for far too long after Katrina.

The official death count stands at 1103.

Of course that doesn't take into account the 1784 still reported missing.

It doesn't take into account the vast swaths of NOEast that haven't been searched yet. (We're talking miles and miles and miles of once densly packed, low income urban neighborhoods... not a few city blocks as the news media likes to imply.)

It doesn't take into account that the raging flash flood waters tore through very early in the morning when most of NOEast was still sleeping, when entire families (three and four generations sleeping in the same small home) would have been washed away and drowned, leaving no one left to report them missing.

So when are they going to search NOEast? They're not. They're going to bulldoze it and put in a nice golf course.

When are they going to admit that the death count isn't 1103, that it isn't even 2887... that it's far, far higher than any of us want to imagine?

When are they going to tell us that of the hundreds of thousands of residents who were whisked away and dispersed to locations throughout the nation are never going home? Have no homes to return to? Have no means to get back there? That the people left there (the new majority, white, conservatives who are about to reclaim all that property under the Supreme Court's new imminent domain policy) don't want them to return?

When are they going to tell us the Truth?

Never. They don't have to.