Blog Post #2 - "1 Dead in Attic"

The two passages I will be comparing are The Elephant Men (48) and Shooting the Rock (229). Chronologically, The Elephant Men was written first. It concerns Rose’s neighborhood in the weeks just after Katrina. The men have started to come back to the city to clean and salvage what still remains of their possessions. These “displaced dads” (48) return without their families due to concerns the city will not be safe for their children. Shooting the Rock was written about ten months after The Elephant Men. Children have now returned to the city. In the article, Rose describes an afternoon of shooting hoops with two boys in a rundown park. He is discouraged about how “kids are pretty much the last consideration in just about every public policy decision around here” (230).
The connection I see between these two articles is that of a father wanting to provide for his children. In The Elephant Men, all the fathers have returned without their families in order to make sure everything is safe and that their family will have some kind of home to return to. In Shooting the Rock, Rose tells the young boys, “You are just like my kids” (232). He feels responsible for providing these children, as well as his own, with some semblance of a normal childhood during a very difficult time. He is dismayed that the city chose to build the emergency housing on the playgrounds instead of around them which would have allowed them “to serve as de facto community centers (allowing) places to play other than debris-strewn streets and sidewalks filled with rotting garbage, roofing nails and rats.” (230).
Every father wants to be able to provide for his children. In the days and months after Katrina the fathers of New Orleans had to go to extreme lengths to do this, and Rose seems discouraged that the local and national government did not do more to help these elephant men and their families.