Disposable people

Absolute inhumanity on display here.   

Between the time of his arrest and the plea deal that sent him to Angola prison on a 20-year sentence for manslaughter, Farrell remained behind bars at Orleans Parish Prison, the New Orleans jail. It was there that the funny, active, energetic son I knew fell gravely ill. First his feet went numb, then the numbness traveled up his legs and started to impede his movement. By the time Farrell was transferred to prison, he was using a wheelchair, but hadn’t yet received the kind of medical attention that could lead to a diagnosis. 

Eventually, he would be diagnosed with transverse myelitis, a neurological disorder of the spine typically caused by infection. Farrell and I both suspected the disease was triggered by unsanitary conditions in the jail. Around the same time his symptoms began, the city of New Orleans was hammered hard by Hurricane Isaac. Farrell told me that the storm had pushed ankle-deep sewage water into many of the cells.

 When they brought Farrell to Angola, they put him in hospice care. He and I were both confused. He didn’t have a diagnosis yet, but there was no reason to believe he was terminally ill or in the last weeks of his life. As it turns out, Angola uses their hospice program, featured in rosy documentaries, to manage care for patients perfectly capable of treatment and even full recovery, as Farrell was. Most transverse myelitis patients recover at least partially, and some completely. 

It hurt — the idea of my 45-year-old son in hospice — but I thought, at least there, Farrell would be well taken care of. I cared for many terminally ill patients over my career, and I hadn’t seen a bad hospice yet — until I saw the one at Angola.

This only happens when a system just determines that the people in its care are disposable.  How is such a thing allowed to happen in the so-called civilized world?  Perhaps it begins with our enlightened political leadership....

I manage to get on the calendar of the current mayor, LaToya Cantrell. When we talk, I remind her that our last encounter was five years ago in Northern Italy—at a conference on disaster recovery, of all things. She chuckles grimly at the parallel between then and now, New Orleans and Northern Italy, two hot spots in a global pandemic. Katrina made Cantrell’s political career, establishing her in her early 30s as a spitfire rabble-rouser in the city’s Broadmoor community. From there it was on to the City Council and, in 2018, the mayor’s office of the nation’s 50th largest city.

I press her about her decision to let Mardi Gras roll. And she explains, as others have confirmed, that no one at the CDC—or anywhere else in the federal establishment or in Baton Rouge—was saying she should cancel the city’s biggest tourist draw.

She has stoutly resisted more recent pressure from advocacy groups urging that police release nonviolent suspects from custody. “You’re worried about criminals catching coronavirus? Tell them to stop breaking the damn law,” snaps Cantrell, a streetwise woman known for her salty tongue.

On the other hand maybe it starts with the craven media establishment who can't help but fawn over the "streetwise salty tongue" of a brute callously deciding who lives and who dies like this.