Outer Journey:
Today we started out the day going
on a tour of the city, and seeing a hurricane and history museum of Louisiana and
New Orleans. I woke up at 6:30 am and got breakfast before getting ready for
the day. I left the school at 7:30 to catch the train by 7:42. When our train
arrived we walked up in front of the French quarter, and waited for our tour
guide to get there. When he arrived he started telling us about the history of
New Orleans and how the peer was used to further the city into the massive port
that it is today. We then walked to the French quarter and he told us about
each of the buildings. Many of the buildings in New Orleans are from the 1800’s.
They have been worked on, but overall the main structures are the same as they
have been for 200 years. We saw two bands with a trumpet, tuba, and a drum. The
way that they played together was really in sync. You could tell they have done
this before. We walked down the street at little more ways and came to a house
that is called the house of the rising sun. “It had been the ruin of many poor
boys, but god I know I’m one.” It was interesting to see the house that the
animals “house of the rising sun.” This has long time been one of my favorite
songs. This house was named because it was a brothel in the day. We kept and
took a break at a community center that had coffee and a place for us to sit
and warm up. It was only about 32 degrees this morning so everyone was ready to
get out of the cold. After we warmed up we went to a very old cemetery that
required a tour guide to be able to go inside due to vandals. We saw a lot of
interesting graves, but I would say the two things that stood out the most to
me would be seeing Nicolas Cage grave, which was a massive pyramid that stood
in the middle of all these older graves. They said he paid more than 40,000
dollars to build it. The other thing that stood out to me was that the cemetery
was not segregated by race, gender, or even class. It was segregated by
religion. The majority of the cemetery was mostly catholic, but toward the back
they had a separated section for protestants. After we finished we went and got
lunch. We then went to a museum about the history and hurricane of Louisiana
and New Orleans. The display was chronological and as you walked through it
showed you the perspective of the survivors that had been through one of the
biggest disasters in New Orleans history, Hurricane Katrina. When we finished at the museum we headed back
to the hotel and rested for a little while. Today was a lot of walking, but it
seems like it went by quickly.
Inner Journey: I never really had a good understanding of
what the people who survived Hurricane Katrina really had to go through. When
walking through the museum I was taken back with the hell that they had to go
through. Many lost everything, and some didn’t even make it out with their
lives. The thing that hit me the hardest was that some people died because lack
of supplies, or overheating. This is the United States of America. The country
that gives aid to virtually every nation in the world, and yet when our own
people needed help it took five days to get any kind of response. People had
horror stories of being trapped in an attic when the levels broke and flood
their houses in minutes. This had to be terrifying. I could not imagine being
trapped in an attic that is filled with water and getting hotter with every
passing minute as the sun beats down. I literally could not imagine anyone
having to suffer like this. To me, this is completely unacceptable. The federal
government is supposed to protect our citizens, and failed these people in two
major ways. First, the army corps of engineers half assed building the levy and
made mistakes in calculations that ended up killing many people, and leaving
hundreds of thousands without a home. Not only did the levy fail, but also the
did not show up for 5 days. This disaster could have been handled much more
efficiently and a lot less people would have suffered and died. It makes me
think about the inequality in our country, and if this had been a city with
rich people would the response would have been different. This question is
something that is a major issue in our country. Income inequality has always
been around, but we have seen how much and power just don’t mix. When someone
rises to power simply because of how much money they have, and not the good
they have done for people and their communities, we start to lose moral
judgement. We start to make decisions based on how much money we can make, and
not based on if it is the right thing to do. We have seen this ugly side of
America with the voting in of President Elect Donald Trump. This man is so
foul, and just makes me sick that someone with so much prejudice, hate, and
lack of empathy for other can be elected to the most powerful office in the
world. He ran on a platform of hate, and constantly discourages simply freedoms
that are supposed to be what makes our country different than all the rest.
After seeing how people were treated after New Orleans it made me think about
how important every life is, and how when something happens to one group of
people in this country it happens to all of us. To close I want to end with one
of my favorite quotes. “When the love of money becomes greater than the love of
power, then the world will know peace.”
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