The natural disaster in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina is likely the worst disaster to befall this country in any of our lifetimes. It has already been compared to the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, but to my knowledge, San Francisco didn’t have to be completely evacuated.
What has happened in New Orleans is the sort of thing we Americans are used to seeing in images from Third World countries — not a city in our own country, less than a day’s drive away.
Like the landslides that often topple rich people’s homes in California, this is an environmental disaster resulting from people living in a place that was never suited for large-scale human habitation. Nevertheless, this environmental disaster didn’t have to turn into the humanitarian disaster it has become.
When the evacuation orders were given in New Orleans as Katrina was approaching, people who didn’t have the means to evacuate were forced to either remain in their homes or go to the Superdome. Nearly 100,000 people — mostly poor and African-American — were left behind instead of being put on buses and trains to be evacuated.
This reminds me of an old Frank Zappa song in which he and the band sing the refrain “It can’t happen here!”
Maybe it can, but it doesn’t seem as though it’s supposed to.
After the tsunami in Asia, rescue efforts began almost immediately. In New Orleans and other affected areas, however, we keep hearing the same complaint: Where is the federal government? On Thursday, days after the storm passed, the Senate finally approved $10.5 billion in aid.
Is there a race issue involved? In a city that, according to the 2000 census, is more than 67 percent black, perhaps there is, or perhaps there’s not. There is, however, a touch of racism involved with what the media have been calling “looting.”
Imagine: You have no food, no potable water, no electricity and on top of that, it’s 90 degrees with 100 percent humidity — and you’ve got hungry, thirsty and miserable kids to worry about. I’ve lived in a sub-tropical climate, and I can say that weather like that makes it miserable to even go outside.
In that kind of situation, breaking into Walgreens to grab diapers, bottled water, food and clothing is not looting at its most brazen, as CNN called it — it’s survival. It’s the only way to survive when the federal government doesn’t seem to be doing its job.
Apparently, however, because we’re seeing replayed footage of black people running in and out of abandoned shops, we have to act as though it’s all nothing but a bunch of criminals. Of course, we might be acting differently if it were a bunch of rich white folks in Beverly Hills; perhaps we’d say, “It’s not looting — the card reader just isn’t working.”
Those of us who were in Muncie during the ice storm in January might be able to sympathize. We had to live for two days with no electricity in the bitter cold, and even then, we were starting to lose it. With the problem being much larger in New Orleans, I’m not surprised that it looks as if the city is about to blow.
I don’t mean to downplay the generosity of people who have contributed tens of millions of dollars to the victims, not to mention the bravery of the aid workers, but it’s important to remember that this human tragedy could have been averted.
Write to Alaric at
ajdearment@bsu.edu
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