Mississippians' Suffering Overshadowed
By EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS, Associated Press Writer

JACKSON, Miss. - Television cameras focus relentlessly on the hellish chaos of New Orleans while hurricane survivors across south Mississippi are desperate for food, clean water and shelter.

Some are angry about a slow federal response to their suffering. Others, aware of the nightmare in New Orleans, say they're prepared to tough it out until relief comes. For many others, there is no news about the outside world because they don't have electricity or newspapers.

On Saturday, Mississippi's death toll from Hurricane Katrina was 144, according to confirmed reports from coroners and the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency. Gov. Haley Barbour had said Friday that the total was 147, but he didn't provide a county-by-county breakdown. He also said he expected the number to rise.

Along the battered Mississippi Gulf Coast on Saturday, crews for the first time started searching boats for corpses. Several shrimpers are believed to have died as they tried to ride out the storm aboard their boats on the Intracoastal Waterway a couple of miles inland.

In poverty-stricken north Gulfport, Grover Chapman expressed disgust that his neighborhood has received no aid from government agencies or from private groups such as the
American Red Cross.

"Something should've been on this corner three days ago," Chapman, 60, said Saturday as he fed his neighbors.

He used wood from his demolished All Seasons produce stand to cook fish, rabbit, okra, and butter beans he'd been keeping in his freezer. The neighborhood is about five miles inland from the beach. Though many houses are still standing, they're severely damaged and corrugated tin roofs lie on the ground.

"I'm just doing what I can do," Chapman said. "These people support me with my produce stand every day. Now it's time to pay them back."

One of Chapman's neighbors, 78-year-old Georgia Smylie, knows little about what's happening beyond her own neighborhood. She's worried about her own situation.

"My medicine is running out. I need high blood pressure medicine, medicine for my heart," she said.

Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political scientist, said he's been watching hours of Katrina coverage every day and most of the national networks' attention focuses on devastation and looting in New Orleans. He says people in other parts of the country want to help victims, but Mississippi is at a disadvantage because the state is getting less attention.

"Mississippi needs more coverage," Sabato said. "Until people see it on TV, they don't think it's real."

President Bush toured ravaged areas of the Mississippi coast on Friday with Barbour, Lt. Gov. Amy Tuck and other state officials. They also flew over flooded New Orleans.

"I'm going to tell you, Mississippi got hit much harder than they did, but what happened in the aftermath — it makes your stomach hurt to go miles and miles and miles and the houses are all under water up to the roof or halfway up," Barbour said.

Richard Gibbs and his wife, Holly, are stuck at their home in Gulfport just off the Biloxi River. Their home flooded to the second floor, the couple is out of gasoline and food supplies are running perilously low.

Holly's 75-year-old father, Charles Slater, who has a pacemaker and has severe diabetes, was with them until the couple got an ambulance to take him to an airport so he could be airlifted to Lafayette, La., for medical help.

Richard Gibbs said Mississippi needs help and he's disgusted by reports of looting in New Orleans.

"I say burn the bridges and let 'em all rot there," he said. "We're suffering over here too, but we're not killing each other. We've got to help each other. We need gas and food and water and medical supplies."

Keisha Moran, who has been living in a tent in a department store parking lot in Bay St. Louis with her boyfriend and three young children, was furious that it took President Bush several days to tour the Mississippi coast.

She laughed bitterly when asked about his trip on Friday.

"It's how many days later? How many people are dead?" Moran said.

She said National Guardsmen have brought her water, but she said there had been no other aid so far. She complained that Florida received federal relief more quickly when it was hit by a string of hurricanes last year and wondered aloud whether the fact that the president's brother is governor there has anything to do with the timing.

In a strongly worded editorial, The Sun Herald of Biloxi-Gulfport pleaded for help for south Mississippi and questioned why a massive National Guard presence wasn't already visible.

"We understand that New Orleans also was devastated by Hurricane Katrina, but surely this nation has the resources to rescue both that metropolitan (area) and ours," the newspaper editorialized. "Whatever plans that were in place to deal with such a natural disaster have proven inadequate. Perhaps destruction on this scale could not have been adequately prepared for."

Survival basics — ice, gasoline and medicine — have been too slow to arrive, the paper wrote.

The paper wrote: "We are not calling on the nation and the state to make life more comfortable in South Mississippi, we are calling on the nation and the state to make life here possible."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050903/ap_ ... ssippi_hk2

Mississippi (needs food/water) VS. New Orleans (actively drowning)

Both are at a tremendous loss. Both are suffering equally.

I guess New Orleans is the sexier story.

If this doesn't correct itself after the rescue efforts in NO, it will be very, very disappointing.

Why doesn't anybody care about the poor white Mississippians?

Like I said, I guess it's a much sexier story to concentrate more on all those black people in New Orleans. Their the only ones that's oppressed anyways.