The millions of vacationers who came here every year before Katrina were mostly unaware of this poverty. French Quarter tourists were rarely exposed to the reality beneath the Disneyland Gomorrah that is projected as 'N'Awlins, ' a phrasing I have never heard a local use and a place, as far as I can tell, that I have never encountered despite my years in the city. The seemingly average, white, middle-class Americans whooped it up on Bourbon Street without any thought of the third-world lives of so many of the city's citizens that existed under their noses. The husband and wife, clad in khaki shorts, feather boa, and Mardi Gras beads well out of season, beheld a child tap-dancing on the street for money and clapped along to his beat without considering the obvious fact that this was an early school-day afternoon and that the child should be learning to read, not dancing for money. Somehow they did not see their own child beneath the dancer's black visage. Nor, perhaps, did they see the crumbling buildings where the city's poor live as they traveled by cab from the French Quarter to Commander's Palace. They were on vacation and this was not their problem. . Billy Sothern
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More Quotes By Billy Sothern
  1. If people are troubled by their view, they ought to offer these New Orleanians, and black and poor people in the places like the Lower Ninth Ward around the country, a reason to believe otherwise.
  2. .I met two young guys from the Oregon National Guard.. The lieutenant told me about their temporary barracks in an old neighborhood high school. He told me that he was disgusted that kids ever went to school there, and that in Oregon the place would...
  3. .I began speaking. First, I took issue with the media's characterization of the post- Katrina New Orleans as resembling the third world as its poor citizens clamored for a way out. I suggested that my experience in New Orleans working with the city's poorest people...
  4. According to the 2003 data from the U.S. Census Bureau, 25.8 percent of [New Orleans] population lives below the poverty line... This is more than twice the national average, but is close tot he percentages in other American cities such as Miami (28.5), Los Angeles...
  5. The millions of vacationers who came here every year before Katrina were mostly unaware of this poverty. French Quarter tourists were rarely exposed to the reality beneath the Disneyland Gomorrah that is projected as 'N'Awlins, ' a phrasing I have never heard a local use...
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