Hurricane Katrina
An American Tragedy
I’d be curious to know what ultimately became of those families
several of our local churches adopted, here, chartering busses and running down to, seemingly arbitrarily, collect hurricane victims and bring them to Colorado of all places. This was a big fad for about a minute, someone’s idea of a biblical response. Rent a bus, run down there, grab up some folk, bring ‘em back. Who’s on that bus? Are there criminals on that bus? Sex offenders? Around the nation, logic yielded to compassion as some fraction of victims were relocated here and there. I’d like to hear the success stories because, mostly what’s in the air is how some of these folks exploited the system, squandering the cash, tore up the houses they were put into free of charge, and essentially sat in the yard fanning themselves. This, of course, is not universally true and is, hopefully, the exception and not the rule, but there has not, to my knowledge, been any extensive follow-up or polling done on the thousands of families relocated during the storm or who left New Orleans after it. Where are they now? How are they doing? How have their lives changed? Was the adopt-a-family fad just that, a fad? What was the length and breadth and depth of our charity toward these people?
Adoption is a lifelong proposition. Couples looking to adopt are usually scrutinized and tested and counseled and, frankly, warned. You are adopting someone else's child. The damage, emotionally, to that child has already been done. regardless of their economic or educational status, by any definition the survivors of Hurricane Katrina have been damaged. Which is not to say don't rent a bus and go grab up a bunch of them but understand what you are getting into and get some counseling first. These are victims of terrible trauma both before and during the storm. You don't just load these people on a bus and put them in your house and have expectations that, the next day, they'll be gainfully employed and productive members of society. It just doesn't work that way. Yu can't smother them with attention, you can't ignore them, you should have expectations that they'll contribute in some way to their own rescue, but you can't dictate their lives. I have no idea what some of our local pastors were thinking when they bought into this adopt-a-family gimmick and I don't think many of them knew, either. To be fair, they wanted to help, and amen to that. But God also wants us to be effective, prayerful, prepared. In all the Katrina retrospectives I've seen, I've not seen much follow-up and no statistics at all on the success rate of these well-intentioned rescues. I can imagine things going well, but also things going terribly, terribly wrong because we have expectations of people we've never met. People of another tribe. Who certainly look like us, who are certainly our kin. But now we've dropped them into the middle of our social organism and expect them to function, almost immediately, in productive ways. I never hear about adopted Katrina families anymore. I wonder how all of that turned out.
From One Hell To Another:: Storm survivors frisked at the Superdome.
America has invested hundreds of billions rebuilding New Orleans,
a city that should not have been there—seven feet below sea level—in
the first place. This is the illogic of disaster, America
(that’s us) spending unthinkable sums over and over to rebuild
where people should not be in the first place. This is done not
out of logic but out of emotion, some sense of pride, I suppose,
or for political reasons. The Port of New Orleans is one of the
most vital seaports in the world and surely should be rebuilt
and shored up. But, like Pompeii, New Orleans should have been
wiped from the face of the Earth, perhaps a new New
Orleans. Greater New Orleans, built somewhere else. Spending
billions to rebuild a city below sea level is insane. Continuing
to give Federal money to homeowners, around the country, who
choose to live n a flood plane is insane. If I voluntarily
choose to walk onto the Interstate and lie down in traffic, the
Federal government should not be paying my hospital and funeral
costs.
While we are (stupidly) rebuilding this city below sea level,
I’d also be much more in favor of building better schools in the
Lower Ninth Ward and begging an aggressive adult literacy
campaign. The government seems barely interested in rebuilding
the thousands of homes lost. I’m just as concerned about souls
lost, alarmed by the thought that the shocking level of literacy
emerging from Katrina’s media saturation paints a picture of
rampant under-education if not outright illiteracy That this
seems to be okay with everybody alarms and disturbs me. Selling
illiterate or ignorant people on education is tough; education
is rarely valued in a culture of ignorance, but the only
reasonable path to fuller, healthier and more productive lives
for many of these people is education, a topic I’ve never heard
connected to the nation’s reinvestment in New Orleans.
49% of New Orleans is at or below sea level. The average
elevation of the city is currently between one and two feet (0.5
m) below sea level, with some portions of the city as high as 20
feet (6 m) at the base of the river levee in Uptown and others
as low as 7 feet (2 m) below sea level in the farthest reaches
of Eastern New Orleans, the portion of the city to the east of
the Industrial Canal and north of the Intracoastal Waterway. It
is often called "New Orleans East" as well, or simply "The
East." New Orleans East is a portion of the Ninth Ward of New
Orleans. Starting in the mid-1980s, New Orleans East
increasingly suffered from disinvestment and urban decay. The
flooding occurring in Hurricane Katrina's wake, which affected
almost all of Eastern New Orleans, accelerated this trend, as
numerous national retailers present and operating in August 2005
have opted not to reopen their stores. Approximately 65,000 to
75,000 residents presently inhabit New Orleans East,
representing a decline from the 95,000 people inhabiting the
area as of the 2000 Census. [Wikipedia]
Last week, some talking head pointed out, recently, that
President Obama rarely uses the term “African American” anymore.
That he neither speaks for nor, apparently, speaks to, the
African American community. The speculation is such that the
president, who seems to have invested virtually all of his time
appeasing and/or responding to the idiot Tea Party and the
spineless Republicans so infested by them, is deliberately
trying to appear neutral, almost to a fault, to the point of
distancing himself from the black community. I am unaware of
what, if any, remarks the president made last week marking
Katrina’s anniversary.
The ultimate lesson of Katrina may be that America’s compassion
is racially and socially subjective. For most of America,
Katrina was The Other Thing Happening To Other People. Millions
of whites were affected both in New Orleans and surrounding
counties in Missouri and Mississippi. But is was mostly the
unthinkable horror of the Superdome, this place in America
looking indistinguishable from the slums of Nairobi, Kenya, that
shocked the world and exposed deep divisions not only between
White and Black America, but between Black America itself
Christopher J. Priest
5 September 2005 Original
4 September 2011 Update
editor@praisenet.org
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