By Harry Mount in New Orleans (Filed: 10/12/2005)
The lessons drummed into America's blacks by politicians of all colours, their own preachers, businessmen, soul singers and rap stars has been the same for decades.
The best way to improve your lot in life, the mantra goes, is not to look to others to do the job on your behalf but to rely on yourselves and yourselves alone.
Barbara Nodo doesn't know if her house will be safe
Few have taken this precept closer to heart than the residents of New Orleans's Lower Ninth Ward, the worst hit survivors of the most devastating natural disaster in recent US history.
Few, however, risk more disappointment in putting it into practice, victims of inertia and incompetence by the powers that be that contrast glaringly with their own efforts.
Where Hurricane Katrina called more than three months ago, everything is still topsy-turvy. Fridges are on roofs, facades ripped off houses, and messages such as "One dog dead in attic" or "1 dead, sorry" still scrawled on surfaces in red aerosol.
In the midst of this destruction, families - poor and black, all of them - are gutting, restoring and renovating their homes. But all their labours could be for nothing, destroyed by the wrecker's ball or the bulldozer.
The overwhelming impression made by a visit is one of delay and stasis at the top while the poorest at the bottom scrabble to salvage their bricks and mortar.
A distant federal government, good ole' boy Louisiana politics and a City Hall that has all but ceased to function have left thousands of black residents high and dry.
"I'm coming home," insisted Barbara Nodo, 59, a widowed, unemployed mother of two, clearing her purple house of the last debris - tracksuit bottoms and a radio caked in mud.
"They're not going to demolish this. I've been coming back and forwards from Houston to clear this place and it's not down to them whether I stay here."
It is in fact up to New Orleans's department of safety and permits whether Mrs Nodo's home with its rusting Spanish ironwork is demolished or not. But the city's inspectors have still not been round to look at the brown water mark that runs 4ft high around her sitting room or the fat blotches of mould in her kitchen.
Houses in the Lower Ninth Ward are decorated with bright orange stickers and red placards that show the horrifying level of delay and indecision over demolitions.
"UNSAFE. Use or occupancy is prohibited. This is not a demolition order," read the orange stickers from the city's safety department.
A placard: 'Save our neighborhood. No bulldozing'
Unable to live in their houses and not knowing if they are to be demolished, residents have started their own protest movement. "Save our neighbourhood," the red placards read. "No bulldozing."
But protesters do not as yet know what or who to protest against and the department of safety and permits is still to announce the date demolition inspections begin.
The dilatoriness of the city authorities is exemplified by Ray Nagin, the mayor who is running for re-election but has no idea when the vote will take place.
Elections were due on Feb 4 but were postponed last week on the grounds that the city will not have enough electricity, voting precincts or personnel to stage them.
In the meantime, instead of addressing the needs of the poor, Mr Nagin has been busy announcing such vital schemes as a city-wide free wireless internet service.
Another "bold statement" at this "time for us to think out of the box", as he put it, was his plan to open seven new casinos, an idea he later had to drop in the teeth of strong local opposition.
There is little sign of federal help, either, beyond a few thousand dollars of FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) hurricane relief for each household.
The delay and lack of progress are not for shortage of cash. The relief and reconstruction operation is estimated to cost a total of £68 billion.
Congress has already voted £36 billion of federal aid and only this week another £54 million was announced by former presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush Senior.
But the oceans of money are held up by the sluggish, obstructive traditions of Louisiana politics.
An effort to consolidate the levee boards, whose rivalry and greed contributed to the slipshod building of the city's flood defences, was voted down unanimously by a meeting of the city's council last month.
"Louisiana politics have always been like this," said Dustin Alfortish, 33, a barman in the city's French Quarter. "There are too many thumbs in the pie.
"And when the pie's full of thumbs, you've got to bake another pie to accommodate more of them."
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