Photo
May
1
2010

Reblogged from claytoncubitt :

claytoncubitt: Sunset, Mississippi Gulf Coast near Waveland, 2008 When I was growing up in New Orleans this is where we’d go “on vacation” for an afternoon. Thousands of years of silt from the Mississippi River meant you could walk out into the blood-warm water for what felt like miles and only have it come up to your waist. Pelicans and snowy egrets would fly overhead. Afterward we’d stop along Old Highway 90 and buy shrimp on the side of the road from men who’d caught it that day, themselves. And now the BP oil spill. That sick pit in my stomach looking at satellite maps when Katrina was churning towards the Gulf Coast was bad. This feels like it again. And those shrimp men who we used to be so happy to see are now signing up to be paid change cleaning up after the corporation that made the mess. Katrina. The plight of poor working people. The Great Recession. The BP oil spill. These aren’t just incidents, or accidents, or unfortunate circumstances. I’m not saying they’re a conspiracy either. I’m saying they’re all a byproduct of a system which is deeply, fundamentally broken, and increasingly can produce no other results. The whole thing is a house of cards built on a toxic foundation. It’s a filthy coal-coated hand reaching from the 19th Century and holding us back by the ankle. It’s a body floating in New Orleans in 2005, a single-mother working three jobs in 2007, a foreclosed house in 2009, an oil-coated pelican in 2010. We can do better. We have to do better.

claytoncubitt:

Sunset, Mississippi Gulf Coast near Waveland, 2008

When I was growing up in New Orleans this is where we’d go “on vacation” for an afternoon. Thousands of years of silt from the Mississippi River meant you could walk out into the blood-warm water for what felt like miles and only have it come up to your waist. Pelicans and snowy egrets would fly overhead. Afterward we’d stop along Old Highway 90 and buy shrimp on the side of the road from men who’d caught it that day, themselves.

And now the BP oil spill. That sick pit in my stomach looking at satellite maps when Katrina was churning towards the Gulf Coast was bad. This feels like it again.

And those shrimp men who we used to be so happy to see are now signing up to be paid change cleaning up after the corporation that made the mess.

Katrina. The plight of poor working people. The Great Recession. The BP oil spill. These aren’t just incidents, or accidents, or unfortunate circumstances. I’m not saying they’re a conspiracy either. I’m saying they’re all a byproduct of a system which is deeply, fundamentally broken, and increasingly can produce no other results.

The whole thing is a house of cards built on a toxic foundation. It’s a filthy coal-coated hand reaching from the 19th Century and holding us back by the ankle. It’s a body floating in New Orleans in 2005, a single-mother working three jobs in 2007, a foreclosed house in 2009, an oil-coated pelican in 2010.

We can do better. We have to do better.

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    spend nearly every summer...our lives riding down with our ma
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