Colette Pichon Battle Quotes

It’s hard, living in this country and even the response to disaster or harm is to go purchase something. You know? That’s — we don’t even know what we’re doing. We’re so unconscious — we just do it unconsciously. We’re so wealthy — just go buy it. Just go take it. It’s yours to take. It takes a lot of courage to examine that, right, because we would have to examine our comfort. We would have to examine the things we worked all our lives to get — the standards. We have really harmful standards that are harming the planet — our standards. We are — as a country, as a nation, as a people who love comfort and love what we love and love our freedom — we are at the tip of the blame knife. And we are causing a lot of harm, and we’re not paying attention. We’re thinking about climate impacts as something that’s harming those poor people over there because they’re poor, or because they have a bad leader, or, you know — but that’s not what’s happening. Our consumption is causing this problem.

You know, we in this country, we all have this starting point of our own struggle, our own existence. And so equitable disaster recovery means you have to acknowledge the past in your action, for the moment and for the future. This is about repair, it’s not just about response. And we in this country have a real problem with that part, right, because blame, for us, is shameful. Responsibility is shameful. But we’re all responsible. If we’re maintaining this system, we are all responsible for the inequities, and therefore, we are all responsible for solutions that are equitable. And it means we have to start at those places that we have created vulnerabilities in, and then go from there. We have enough resources to help everybody. This is about where you start.

I started reading Red Cross papers and FEMA paperwork, and I’m thinking to myself, I’m a lawyer and I can’t understand this stuff. How can regular folks understand what they’re signing? And they were signing their life away. They were signing their property. They were signing, you know, to receive dollars that then got them into lawsuits with the federal government because they didn’t spend them the right way. You know, no one’s telling them what to do, they’re just telling them to sign the paperwork. And this got to understanding what happens when you don’t invest in your education system, what happens when the rest of the nation allows for the South’s education system to go to those low levels. It means, in disaster, people don’t understand the paperwork that they’re signing or the implications behind them. And oh, by the way, neither did the lawyer. Like, I had to like, break that stuff down and read it, too.

the structures and the laws of our country do not work for the least of us. In fact, they create and marginalize people. They create vulnerability, and then we blame people for that vulnerability by saying something about their own individual acts. What we witnessed in Katrina was not a series of poor choices by individuals. We witnessed the breakdown of a system, or: we witnessed a system working the way it was designed to work.

it was a moment for me that I understood, well, I have a purpose here. We’ve got to change these laws. We’ve got to change the society. It is the structures that we are living in that is the problem. I am not talking about you liking me, or me liking you, anymore. We’re now going to talk about, does this work for the least of us, which goes back to that very Catholic upbringing...That’s what I learned. That’s who we’re supposed to care about. That’s who we’re supposed to take the time to make things work for.

there are bad people in this world, but mostly, there are just people who don’t know.

I don’t have this law degree for nothing. And the laws as they are written right now are not meant for me, and they’re not meant for my community, and they’re not meant to help people, and they’re not meant to save people, and they’re not meant to do those things with the utmost humanity and dignity. They are meant to preserve a middle-class tax base, period, almost every law that we have. How does this affect the taxpayer? is the analysis that is used.

it was the most honest answer I’d ever gotten.

people ask me all the time, if you know your land is going to go, why are you still fighting?...I don’t know what they’re expecting, you know? We going down swinging if we going.

that land, for people like me, was tied to our freedom. You know, that land, the land and the right to be there was tied to — it was the difference between being enslaved and not. It was — it is a culture that has birthed a lot of people. And to lose that — it felt in that moment that we would lose everything.

And that was a moment where you sort of have this — it’s surreal. You don’t — who can believe your land won’t be there anymore? Most people still can’t conceptually understand that.

there are all of these researchers who were looking at South Louisiana before Katrina, many people concerned about sea level rise and all of these things for a very long time, but it wasn’t common knowledge. It wasn’t information brought to the communities. The universities knew it, but the communities didn’t know.

TV didn’t show the places around New Orleans. So driving across the bridge on Lake Pontchartrain, you have to go through a swamp, and everything that was so green all of my life was brown and stinky. And it was just death. I’d never smelled death like that. Everything died. The salt water intrusion killed all the vegetation in the swamp that you have to drive through.

the sea level rise is real, and for those of us who are very close to the sea, we can see it.

now the land is perpetually saturated, because the water is rising, the water table is rising, the lake is rising