Lessons Learned from Hurricane Isaac

CENTRAL — Outdoor sweat is superior to indoor sweat. After being without power for four days in the aftermath of Isaac, I was reminded once again that houses built today are strictly for use with air conditioning, especially in a Louisiana summer.

But do you remember the days when houses were built with “good cross ventilation”? A good house always had it. The house had to be positioned and the windows configured so as to take advantage of the natural wind currents.

A house with good cross ventilation was quite livable in the summer time.

Do you remember attic fans? When I was a child growing up in the 1950’s, we lived for several years on a farm in Pointe Coupee Parish. Summers were blazing hot, especially picking cotton. (Yes, I did!) But what I really remember about the heat was the attic fan.

At night, if you were a child and your bed was near a window, you were in paradise. A cool breeze blew across you, turning the heat of the day into a delicious wind as luxurious as it gets.

Sometimes, it would get downright cold, and Mama would put a blanket over me. With the windows open, you’d hear the sounds of the night. Wolves howling in the distance. Our dog answering. The cows, horses, and chickens making their nighttime sounds, especially if something disturbed them.

Everything seemed so natural. A summer rain storm with lightning would wake you up.

When it rained, Daddy would turn off the attic fan, because it wasn’t necessary and would blow the rain in. But you’d go back to sleep even harder, the rain surpassing the best sleeping pill ever made.

But houses today aren’t made like that. Without electricity, the air is thick and still. There’s no cross ventilation. In fact, often the windows are permanently locked down.

Everything today has to have a lock. When we moved back to Baton Rouge and lived on Conrad Drive near Istrouma High, I remember that we seldom locked our doors. When we went on vacations to Destin in the 1950’s and 1960’s, we never locked them.

Not for the reason you think. It wasn’t a lackadaisical attitude about crime. There was crime in those days but not as much.

We left our door unlocked because Mama and Daddy knew our neighbors might need to borrow something or check on things. “What if there’s a fire?” Daddy asked. “I don’t want them to break down the door.”

So we didn’t lock the door. But when we’d come back from a trip, it wasn’t unusual to walk in the house and find a fresh baked pie waiting for us on the kitchen table. One of the neighbors would be baking and remembered the day we were coming home.

“Welcome back!” the note would say. But it was never signed.

After Isaac, with the power out for four days, I tried sitting in the house, but it was unbearable for more than a few minutes.

Too darn hot!

So I passed a lot of time clearing the debris from five acres. It was good, honest sweat, the kind you earn, not the sickly sweat you get in a house when there’s no power after a hurricane.

HHH

An Obscure Letter to the Editor. Last week, a publication here in Central, which I will call Brand X, ran a front-page story, entitled “Central’s Image on the Line,” which was filled with personal attacks against the Central City News and me.  Words were hurled such as “racist, offensive, defamatory, accusatory, speculative, presumptuous, untenable, irrational, ignorant, harmful, and probably libelous.”  The attack piece took up more than a full page of Brand X.

What was the crime of the Central City News and of me personally?  Supposedly, our crime was the publication of a Letter to the Editor — not anything I wrote but the fact that we provided a forum for one of our readers.  The letter to the editor by Mr. Andy Ash of Central decried the use of illegal aliens by contractors doing business with the government.  Mr. Ash’s views are not unusual in Central or anywhere else in America, because we have between 11 million and 20 million illegal aliens in the United States, and the largest group is from Mexico.  Millions of them are working here illegally.  As a result, American citizens in all 50 states — not just in Central — are very upset that illegal aliens are not only working here illegally but in many cases their jobs are being paid for with our tax dollars.

It was a rather obscure letter, because its headline was tiny, only 17 points.  The body type you are reading right now is 11 points.  But, according to Brand X, the publication of this Letter to the Editor put “Central’s Image on the Line.”  In other words, the publication of this single letter was so damaging that it threatened to destroy Central’s image and with it everything we have all worked so hard to accomplish over the past years!

Brand X presented Mr. Ash’s letter not as a legitimate view that an American might have as he sees his own government allowing millions of illegals to cross our borders, take jobs, commit crime, and/or get on welfare.  No, this was presented as a viewpoint found in Central that might give the world the idea that we in Central have “unfounded and outdated stereotypes of racial intolerance and prejudice.”

Yet, instead of hiding away this Letter to the Editor in hopes that no sensible person would ever read it or associate it with Central, Brand X decided to publish the offending letter on its front page and to devote more than a page to condemning the letter, the letter writer, the Central City News, and me.

If you believe the attacks against the Central City News by Brand X were caused by our publishing a Letter to the Editor, you probably also believe the attack against the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was caused by a YouTube video.  But I’ll leave to you figuring out the “why” of the attack.

As an author of the Freedom from Discrimination Article of the current Louisiana Constitution — perhaps the strongest prohibition against racial discrimination in America — I don’t think I’ve ever been called a racist before. But this kind of attack is not unusual for Brand X.  They have launched many similar attacks against Mayor Pro Tem Ralph Washington, Councilman Tony LoBue, Councilman Wayne Messina, and anyone else who dares to speak the truth and be an independent voice in Central.