What We Learned from Katrina

The long-term significance of Hurricane Katrina has been summed up with simple eloquence by Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourner’s magazine: "Sometimes it takes a natural disaster to reveal a social disaster.” It goes without saying that the recent disaster on the Gulf Coast turned a powerful microscope on the nation’s social ills. The shame that Americans have been experiencing in Katrina’s aftermath is both deep and broad in scope. The core cause of this shame was the recognition that we could not administer properly to our own citizens in a time of crisis. That shame however, was aggravated by the knowledge that this failure was visible to the rest of the world in the form of wretched poverty, starving individuals, and dead bodies floating for days in pools of water. Ironically, even the well-meant offers of aid that poured in from other nations added to our embarrassment, as we were forced to see our international image as that of a crippled, helpless giant. From the perspective of the Bush administration, is there anything worse than having Venezuela offer us aid? Finally, our shame has been magnified by viewing the deep pockets of poverty that were revealed in New Orleans. This “underclass,” usually an abstraction, whose concrete reality is hidden from us, suddenly came into startlingly plain view, with its conditions of hopelessness, starvation, and despair; conditions so powerful on our television screens that we could almost reach out and touch them.

Jim Wallis’ point however, goes further. His statement suggests that the poor of New Orleans were experiencing a disaster long before Katrina ever hit. Katrina’s role was to force all of us to observe the city’s destitute citizens, huddled within one building, in a manner so poignant and riveting that this time we could not turn away from them. And once we had seen the poor of New Orleans, the cat was out of the bag: The poverty wasn’t just about one delta city. Rather, it was a metaphor for the poor all over the country, people without means, without stable employment, without political voice, who constantly exist only one hardship away from catastrophe. Our moral imperative now was to do something about it.

What about the racial and class dimensions to Katrina? Beyond the fact that the black and the poor live in the most flood-vulnerable sections of New Orleans, did race and class affect the vigor of the federal response to the disaster? I think the answer is clearly, yes. However unpleasant the thought, the longstanding history of the nation is that we have consistently failed to value the lives of all citizens equally. Rather, our valuation of life and death has chronically been tainted by all sorts of factors: race, social class, professional status, intelligence, attractiveness, etc. Take the case of the disappearance of white, blonde, 18 year old Natalee Holloway in Aruba. However compelling and newsworthy, Holloway’s disappearance generated a media response 100 times greater than that of any person of color who has ever been listed as missing. Indeed, while names like Holloway and Jon Benet Ramsey come easily to mind as objects of national concern, few people can name any such African-American victim.

In another recent example, the billions of dollars paid out to survivors of 9/11—however appropriate and right-minded—have left Oklahoma City survivors scratching their heads. It is hard to make a case that the suffering of 9/11 survivors is any more compelling, or worthy of compensation than that of Oklahoma City survivors. And yet, as a nation we made exactly that determination. In part, this was because the 9/11 disaster felt more national in scope; we all felt that we had a stake in a tragedy wrought by a foreign enemy. But beyond that rationale, I believe that the nation made a reflexive judgment that because the fallen of 9/11 were prominent, the leaders of industry, the best and the brightest, their deaths were more tragic, more compelling, and more valuable than those of the fallen in the Federal Building of Oklahoma City. And if Oklahomans feel that this judgment reflects class distinctions, I would not disagree with them. Nor am I saying that such distinctions are conscious, or the result of some conspiracy; rather they are collective judgments that are made almost unconsciously.

And so it was with the victims of Hurricane Katrina. No one in the Bush administration said, “Heck, they’re just poor black people. Let’s just sit on our hands for awhile.” There was no conspiracy against the citizens of New Orleans. No one was out to get them. Instead, the blunder was passive: No one in the federal government was attentive enough to see the magnitude of the suffering, and for three days, authorities did not act in a way that was proportionate to the disaster. Much has been made of the non-response to Katrina as showing a lack of preparedness for a terrorist attack. One commentator on CNN said, “If it had been a terrorist attack, the response would have been equally inadequate.” I disagree. Had it been a terrorist attack, the federal government would have seen it from the get-go as a national rather than regional concern. The response would have been immediate, massive, and robust. By contrast, the poor people huddled in the Superdome, or stranded on rooftops simply did not trigger the same urgency.

Are there any silver linings in this massive cloud? Yes, the renewal of concern about poverty in the nation is one silver lining. In fact, we’re already seeing a conservative push back on this issue. George Will wrote disdainfully two days ago of the “$6.6 trillion of anti-poverty spending,” disbursed since 1964. In dismissing the notion that we should renew our anti-poverty efforts, Will offers his three rules for combating poverty:

“Graduate from high school, don't have a baby until you are married, don't marry while you are a teenager. Among people who obey those rules, poverty is minimal.”

Well that pretty much sums it up, doesn’t it? In the world of George Will, poverty could be ended next week if only those irresponsible poor people would just shape up. Perhaps the lone role of the federal government then would be to hand out cue cards carrying Will’s words of wisdom. Because I live in the real world, I know that even Will’s goals can only be attained with the help of significant support from the federal government. Allow me to offer my own three rules for combating poverty:

1) Create a genuine livable wage floor for all citizens. Each time there is a proposal to put the minimal wage on a par with inflation, businesses kick and scream that recessionary unemployment will result. Once the raise occurs, however, the sky does not fall, and the dire predictions turn out to be fiction. Give the working poor a livable wage!

2) Pass universal health care. We don’t feel appropriate shame about the 45 million people without insurance, because, like the underclass of New Orleans, we can’t see or comprehend the misery. Provision of health care to all citizens is not only the just thing, in the long run it’s the economical thing.

3) Most importantly, disconnect the public school system from each community’s property taxes. The notion that rich communities are entitled to quality schools, commensurate with sizable property values, and poor communities are entitled to inferior schools as a result of their own tax base, is an outrage. If we based the quality of a community’s water, plumbing, and electrical grid on their tax base, there would be a storm of protest. Yet, we accept uncritically the notion that manifestly unequal funding of public schools is a just system. Create a level playing field for all the public schools in a state!

Hey George, I’ll accept your three rules, if you accept mine.

Finally, many have tried to find some biblical significance in the devastation. I have a more secular take: The natural disaster was a tremendous karmic blow delivered to the Bush administration. Every episode of Bush administration incompetence and posturing during the last five years, every failed attempt at blame-shifting and denial (“Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job”), every attempt at using ignorance and poor intelligence as a defense (“I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees”), every failed attempt at PR (the pathetic, cosmetic flyover in Air Force One), came back to club the administration over the head. The weight of public opinion has been so strong in this case, that Bush could not even follow his usual MO of defending and rewarding incompetence (awarding the Medal of Honor to Bremer, Tenet, and Franks). His breezy attempt to prop up disgraced FEMA head Michael Brown collapsed in a heap only days later. And Bush’s recent acknowledgement—two weeks after the disaster—that the federal government screwed up, is a remarkable departure for him. The fact that Bush actually felt compelled to acknowledge a mistake, truly confirms that a sea change has occurred in attitudes toward the administration. Perhaps that is the real silver lining in the dark cloud of Katrina: Millions of Americans are reevaluating this administration in the fresh knowledge that after the devastation of Katrina, the emperor has no clothes.
- posted by jeffrowan111 @ 6:19 PM