Welcome To The Terrordome:
Race, Class, Misplaced Priorities and Optional Tragedy.
I am, saddened, appalled, outraged and disgusted at my government's gross
negligence, monstrous mismanagement and callous indifference toward the victims
of Hurricane Katrina. I am, at this moment, ashamed to be an American. And let
me say, preemptively, that if anyone replies "well get out then" I will punch
you dead in your face. Yes. It's that real.
My initial response, like those of most of us who follow human tragedy, was one
of shock, pity, empathy. From whence, then, comes this wave of anger, this
storm surge of emotion seething within me that threatens to overcome my better
nature? It comes with the realization that, despite the capricious and
uncontrollable nature of the hurricane, the vast majority of the tableau of
misery that plays out before us represents an Optional Tragedy. Examination of
the facts that lie in the background, below the din of sensational news
headings, reveals a truth irreconcilable with the lofty ideals that we export
around the world at gunpoint: these people are dying mainly because they are
poor, and black. Beyond that, though, and not contradictorily, these people are
also dying because of the historic ineptitude and criminal indifference of a
Bush administration that has made the Federal Emergency Management Agency a
slavish servant of their idiotic ideology.
Optional? Yeah. In the earliest days of the news coverage, reporters and talking
heads parroted lines about people who decided to ˜ride it out', as if the
majority of the people in the path of Hurricane Katrina truly had a say in the
decision. The 2000 census listed New Orleans' population at 485,000, with 27%
below the ridiculously low federal poverty level. That works out to about
135,000 people, not counting others who may have slipped below the line during
our past five years of prosperity. The median income in New Orleans is $27,000,
so half of those 485,000 people made less than that. And that says nothing of
the surrounding areas of Louisiana, or of those living in Mobile, Alabama,
Biloxi, Mississippi, or in places so remote that they are not even on the
national radar.
How many people in households making $27,000 a year can afford to just up and
take a few hundred-miles trip on a couple of days' notice? Unlike a handful of
adventurers and some hardheaded veterans of hurricanes past, these people were
not trying to ˜ride it out', they had no ride out. Assuming, they did have a
car, in reliable, working condition, could they afford a tank of gas, at over
$2.50 per gallon? A hotel stay? Don't kid yourself. They didn't choose to stay,
they were Left Behind, like those forsaken by God in the best-selling fictional
biblical account of the ˜end times'. These souls were not Left Behind by God,
though, they were left behind by their fellow man.
The only ˜option' exercised was the option of the various city, state and
federal emergency management agencies to NOT provide for their evacuation.
There should have been convoys of buses and military transport vehicles BEFORE
the hurricane, offering transport to safety for any and all citizens. And yet,
on Tuesday I was hearing news anchors asking the dim, but by then-rhetorical
questions of "Why didn't they leave?", leaving talking heads and studio experts
to explain that economics played a major part, while giving no specifics, and
allowing unsophisticated viewers to guess for themselves how many were dirt
poor versus those who were hardheaded, and kinda ˜got what they deserved'.
What they SHOULD have been discussing was why nothing was done by the government
to provide transportation for these people to get them out of harm's way.
Hmm... Save that for angry editorialists to hash out in long-assed columns. But
I don't really expect much depth from national news media these days, so that,
while disappointing and maddening, it was not surprising. What was absolutely
shocking, however, was to hear Michael Brown, Director of FEMA, on Thursday
evening, following a live CNN broadcast from the convention center in New
Orleans, speaking, repeatedly, in terms of people who "CHOSE" to stay. Even
after the anchor, to his credit, corrected him and mentioned the poorest of the
poor status of those Americans living in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi,
Brown stubbornly or ignorantly continued to use the word "chose" to describe
why the people were in the path of Katrina's wrath.
More appalling, however, was that he, the top FEMA official, did not know until
hearing CNN's report in the background that there were thousands of people who
had been stranded at the New Orleans Convention Center for three days without
food or water. YOU CAN'T EVEN WATCH CNN?? That really inspires my faith in our
government's resolve.
The herding of people into the Superdome was an act of desperation, necessitated
by the utter lack of a plan to evacuate people who had no transportation from
the city. The president, dull-witted as ever, proclaimed on Thursday that, "I
don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees."
You don't think? I'll buy that. It didn't cross your mind while playing golf, on
yet another of your record number of vacations. And you must have MISSED the
news I watched, which, following Katrina's deadly romp through Florida, warned
that a Category 5 hurricane would destroy New Orleans as we know it, by
destroying the levee and canal system. The president could have also looked at
disaster readiness reports from FEMA in 2001 (pre 9/11), which listed a
category 5 hurricane in N.O. as one of the three likeliest, most catastrophic
disasters facing this country.
Can't recall when you saw that report, Mr. Bush? It was after you appointed a
political crony with no disaster management expertise (your former Texas chief
of staff John Allbaugh) as director of FEMA. And before you downsized FEMA from
a cabinet level department and made it part of the Department Of Homeland
Security. And before you started your optional war in Iraq (which by the way,
is where 35% of the disaster area's National Guard troops are). It was also
before you decided to privatize the agency, and contract out a lot of its
function. And definitely before this June, when you slashed the New Orleans'
Army Corps Of Engineers budget by $71.4 million, including money designed to
prevent floods and shore up the levees.
Bush's administration in 2001 decried that FEMA could engender a ˜culture of
entitlement' (what's all that ˜provide for the common defense and promote the
general welfare' stuff about, anyway?) among citizens. Under the savvy
direction of Allbaugh, armed with no disaster training but good ol' Texas
business know-how, FEMA reckoned it could save $200 million from its budget by
cutting so-called ˜mitigation' strategies, grants used to essentially help
prevent disasters, by moving people from flood plains, and making improvements
to local infrastructure and emergency facilities. $200 million is paltry (I
daresay, niggardly), compared to the billions of dollars of damage that
hurricanes do to our increasingly built up coastlines. The old chief of the New
Orleans Army Corps of Engineers quit over the continual slashing of his budget
and the tying of his hands regarding flood preparedness. The current chief
stated on national TV, after the levee breaks, that they were only built to
withstand a category 3 hurricane, and that was ok, because it was an acceptable
risk for the money they had to spend. If he were in corporate America he'd be
soo fired. As it stands, he'll probably be promoted.
I've learned all of this troubling information after the fact. It is infuriating
enough. But to juxtapose this record of governmental malfeasance with the
images and reports, first trickling, now pouring, from the Superdome? Putting
them there was desperate and, by definition short term. I worried when they
said folks needed to bring their own food. But with no running water (ie, no
working bathrooms), and no electricity, let alone AC, or food, or drinking
water, the place has become the Terrordome, a brooding, stinking cesspool of
people cramped together in ignorance and uncertainty, and increasingly littered
with corpses of victims of the colossal ineptitude of the public officials paid
to protect and serve them. The conditions are not only worse than those of any
prison in the US, if the inhabitants were rottweiler or pitbull puppies, the
˜owners' would be arrested for cruelty. They are sitting and sleeping in their
own feces because their government said "come here and we will help you", and
then never came back. Even slaves had water, and enough gruel to sustain the
strongest through the Middle Passage.
We, who can project our military might all the way around the globe, could not
get troops there right after the hurricane, and buses, and amphibious marine
transports to get these people out? Had they done so, and not left some of
those Left Behind to play out this sick, Lord Of The Flies type scenario (with
Wal-Mart guns), perhaps some of these suffering people would not have been
doubly and trebly victimized?
I see children on tv screaming "help us" and sad-faced news people zooming by in
their vans, footage in the can. I see looped footage of looting, as if stealing
t-shirts (or, stupidly, tv's) somehow justifies the treatment of the miserable
yet law-abiding masses of people waiting to die in the hot sun. People forced
to push their dead grandmothers off into a corner, against a wall, so the stink
of her body does not overpower those still hanging on. People who have climbed
through roofs and slid through windows with jagged glass, untreated, or waded
through waist high filth, to have guns drawn on them by cops threatening to
shoot them for taking the only available food from stores that will never see
another customer. And the many people who have waited for days for buses that
did not come and who have literally dived off of the elevated highway ramps to
their sacrificial death on the hard concrete below, on the altar of inhumanity,
indifference, and misplaced priorities. Hard concrete. Like the hearts of those
who say "we're doing all we can" but who expect us to believe that a single
gunshot warrants turning around a National Guard helicopter, thwarting these
˜heroes' from rescuing old ladies and babies on hand-cranked life support, when
their brethren face far more danger in Iraq, ducking bombs and bullets for no
good reason.
"They chose to stay". No. ˜We' chose to leave them, and every death of a person
who could have been evacuated, before, or right after the hurricane was
optional. Governors have called this ˜our Tsunami' as they fly safely over the
carnage. No. That is not quite right. Death, in the Tsunami, was democratic.
The super rich and abject poor alike were swept away with little to no
forewarning. No. Here, in the world's biggest self-promoting democracy, we had
options, and, like so many of our policies and politicians on a daily basis, we
opted not to give a damn about our poor. And so they died. And we wring our
hands about gas prices. Every needlessly dead person's body should be piled at
the feet of the irresponsible officials. So they can ponder their options.
Derek M. Jennings
