Katrina Exposes The Great Divide

For a week, now, the Indignant Citizen has struggled to find words to describe what occurred on the U.S. Gulf Coast.

“Cataclysm.” Check.

“Catastrophe.” Double check.

“Clusterfuck.” Triple check.

And that’s just the C’s. Other words that have been tossed around in the same careless manner with which the storm, Katrina, tossed boats and houses and lives include “racist,” “incompetent,” “heroic,” “lawless,” “squalor,” and let’s not forget “toxic.”

And certainly all of those words have applied in one way or another following the costliest (likely in terms of both money and lives) natural disaster ever to strike the United States of Petroleum … oops, I mean America: Hurricane Katrina.

But after so much searching for the right words to tap a theme here, to put this monumental tragedy into perspective—to offer some goddamn clarity—in the end perhaps our goofy child president’s mother, the Other Barbara Bush, said it best. Here she is quoted in an Associated Press story picked up by the New York Times: “What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality,” she said during a radio interview with the American Public Media program “Marketplace.” “And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.”

Yes, it must be of great comfort to the tens of thousands of former New Orleans residents currently living on cots on the floor of the Astrodome in Houston that the former First Lady of the United States can relate so closely to their situation. Why, she seems to be the first to grasp the notion that that ol’ hurricane, Katrina, was a blessing in disguise, freeing these people from their underprivileged lives in the Bayou as well as, you know, their homes, their families and all their worldly possessions.

And right there, ladies and gentlemen, in the words uttered by the gentle “Bar” as she gazed over the sea of downtrodden Negros bused into Houston from another city, there lies the fault line neatly splitting this … this event neatly in half for this country of haves and, increasingly, have-nots.

Illinois Sen. Barack Obama put it this way in the Sun-Times: “I think there were a set of assumptions made by federal officials that people would hop in their SUVs, and top off with a $100 tank of gas and [get some] Poland Spring water” and flee the storm.

But we can extend the attribution of those assumptions beyond “federal officials.” The Indignant Citizen overheard a conversation among coworkers last Wednesday that made his skin crawl and his blood boil. Partaking in this discussion were three “haves,” which is to say three white, middle-management males. It went something like this:

White Male #1: “Can you believe this shit on TV? These people are like wild animals.”

White Male #2: “I know. You didn’t see looting and that shit in New York after 9/11.”

White Male #3: “Who’s going to want to send donations to help those people after watching them go crazy in the streets on TV? I’m not. I’m not sending them anything.”

Revisionist history is always so nice. So perfect. In Revisionist History Land, the Indignant Citizen scored the winning goal in the state championship game for his high school soccer team. Of course the reality of an own goal in the last game of a 3-9 season was much different. And in New York cops and firefighters, the same heroes who saved thousands and were rightly lauded in the press, looted the stores underneath the collapsed Twin Towers even as the dust settled.

The Indignant Citizen also spoke with a former Red Cross employee who said, with conviction, that the media was overhyping stories about refugees trapped amid child rapes, shootings, feces-smeared walls and suicides at the squalid Superdome and Convention Center. “They’re poor, and they have a certain victim mentality to begin with,” the former Red Cross employee said. “Stressful situations just tend to exacerbate it, and you get stories like the ones you’re seeing on TV.”

As the water in New Orleans rose, the Indignant Citizen’s heart sank. This storm, which so ruthlessly and completely stripped the physical landscape, laid open New Orleans’—and the nation’s—social fabric, exposing us to one another for what we are: Haves and have-nots. It has illuminated the gulf between those two that has been hidden by the darkness of denial, and it has shown, clearly and decisively, that there are many more people on the have-nots side of the equation than on the haves side.

There is plenty of blame to be shared for the humanitarian disaster that followed the hurricane itself. Local government, at least in New Orleans’ case, was shown to be corrupt and inept at protecting its own citizens. Why didn’t the city evacuate those who could not evacuate themselves, using school buses, public transportation and any other means available? Why did it fail to protect its telecommunications system and why did it not have enough food and water at the Superdome to handle the flood of refugees?

How could local, state and federal officials all have so badly underestimated the damage Katrina would cause? How could they not have understood the limits of the levee system built to keep the Mississippi River and Lake Ponchartrain at bay? Why did the Homeland Security Department, via the Federal Emergency Management Agency, wait three days to request airplanes from the airlines to evacuate flood victims? Why weren’t there enough helicopters stationed near the Gulf to deal with rescue and relief efforts?

As the media post mortem continues, papers are delivering disturbing revelations. The Wall Street Journal, for example, published a story on Sept. 6 that said FEMA, after being subsumed into Homeland Security in 2003, lost control of $800 million in disaster preparedness grants in the intervening years. The agency could give grants to local governments to buy chemical suits, but not to upgrade telecom infrastructure or to buy equipment to deal with the aftermath of natural disasters.

Additionally, FEMA apparently had to abide by Homeland Security rules when it came to chartering airliners to get victims out of the city. Those rules mandated that each flight have an air marshall and that passengers undergo full security screenings complete with metal detectors and X-ray machines. But it took days to arrange for enough air marshals and there was no electricity to power the screening machines.

When Louisiana National Guardsmen deployed to Iraq, they took special equipment that could have been used in New Orleans with them, including high-water vehicles, refueling tankers and generators. The assumption was that if Louisiana was hit by a major storm, National Guard units from Mississippi and Alabama could deploy to help. Katrina caused damage from Texas to Florida, tying up those adjacent Guard units in their home states.

U.S. Army troops at Fort Polk, near New Orleans, weren’t deployed by the Pentagon because a key unit there is preparing to ship out for Afghanistan this winter. Meanwhile it took the 82nd Airborne three days to arrive in Louisiana. It’s designed to be anywhere in the world in 18 hours.

The list goes on. As bad as the storm was, the pathetic post-storm response was a clusterfuck of monumental proportions that in the end may wind up killing as many people as the wind and rain.

You can say some of the victims failed to take care of themselves. Certainly there are those who could have left did not. But many who stayed had no choice, or saw no choice, which is pretty much the same thing. They had no access to a car in which to flee, and even if they did they couldn’t fathom leaving behind their posessions. Doing so would have been tantamount to giving it away, and people’s desire to not lose what they have is often inversely correlated with how much they have to lose.

Then there were stories of those who left with less than they could have. One woman interviewed on TV said other guests at the hotel where she and her husband were staying before the storm packed up their cars and drove off, declining others’ pleas for rides despite the fact they had plenty of room. There is a special plane in Hell for people like that, and the Indignant Citizen will enjoy projecting molten piss into their screaming mouths in the next life.

Socially, we have arrived at a crossroads. Forget for now whether or not to rebuild New Orleans and the fact that the Cheap Oil era just ended with a thud. Those are subjects for another day.

Katrina has exposed the canyon that separates the two sides of our society. One side grows in number while the other grows in wealth. How will we address this? Will we address it at all? In the answers to those questions lies the future of this country.

One final thought: The casinos along the Gulf, businesses to which many have-nots were drawn because the wages were decent and offered a chance to join the haves, were completely destroyed. Those jobs are gone. However a number of the casino companies have promised to pay their workers for 90 days, through November. Wal-Mart, on the other hand, that engine of the New Economy to which so many haves point as a beacon for growth and to which many have-nots have struggled in vain to get ahead; Wal-Mart, the largest retailer in the U.S.; Wal-Mart has generously offered its newly unemployed workers a whole three days’ pay.

The Indignant Citizen wonders how Barbara Bush would spin that.