September 28, 2005

by Gus Stevenson

Last Sunday, a rainstorm passed through St. Louis, bringing strong winds and heavy downpours through most of the day. This storm was what was left of Hurricane Rita, which passed through Texas a few days earlier, bringing flooding and devastation to the Gulf Coast area of that state—all the way up to Houston. It leveled homes for miles in every direction. It also brought further flooding to another major American city.

Rita was the successor to another, even more devastating hurricane, called Katrina.

Much has been said over the past month since that hurricane struck. Many are trying to understand how a part of America could so easily turn as deadly, chaotic, and hopeless as the New Orleans area and other gulf coast cities did during those fateful days. Many wonder what the implication is as to how ready America is to handle another terrorist attack. Others question whether or not the response would have been different had the demographics of the area been different—considering that the majority of those stranded by the floods were poor, black, old, or sick. Would the government have responded with a greater sense of urgency had the victims been rich, white, and powerful?

In the last month since this great disaster, a tremendous amount of money, aid, and support has poured into the region. Katrina is a major topic of discussion on the news, Congress is working to fund the recovery effort, crews are working around the clock to pump the massive amounts of water back out to sea, and millions of people are donating money to help.

However, I just can’t help but wonder why the response wasn’t as swift, the emotion not as high, and even the level of compassion as great as another national tragedy that occurred about four years ago.

The attack in September 2001 was indeed a life-changing experience for the entire country. It was a day that burned itself into all of our memories, and it produced a scar in the history of our country that will probably never fully heal. However, I believe that, in some ways, the disaster in New Orleans may have been even more devastating. The city of New York still stood after the great World Trade Center towers fell. And had New York fallen, not a voice in this country would say we couldn’t rebuild it.

When the Great Chicago fire devastated that city, it was rebuilt. When Georgia was leveled during the Civil War, it was rebuilt. But now, New Orleans—an American city, a fun American city, a major American city, has fallen. There was talk of leaving it, like a pile of rubble in the sea. Let the sea have it, it’s only New Orleans. Suddenly, we started to view part of our own country the way we’ve looked at other parts of the world for years. It’s only Cuba, it’s only Rwanda, it’s only Bosnia. And we started referring to people from this other part of the world as "refugees." They were "those people" escaping the misfortune of their homelands, seeking refuge here in America.

But they’re not "those people," they’re OUR people! They’re not "refugees," they’re American evacuees! It doesn’t take long to deconstruct the mindset of the government and the media in those early days of the disaster to see that the old prejudices and indifference that we may have thought were behind us are still present. Instead of reporting on the full extent of the human suffering, and the devastation, and the helplessness that these people were experiencing, our government and media chose to focus on the looting and the shooting. Taken out of context, this may have caused the casual viewer to think that those people were somehow bad and undeserving of help. Never mind that these people were in the midst of chaos and desperation—that they needed mattresses so that their dying grandparents didn’t have to lay on the hot asphalt of the highway (cooked by the summer Louisiana sun), or that they needed food to keep from starving. They didn’t tell you that people weren’t shooting AT rescue helicopters, but were shooting into the air to signal for help. They didn’t discuss that lawlessness reigned in some areas not because all these people were criminals, but because these people were in a desperate situation, and there was no one in charge to keep order.

In short, a major port city that helped make America what it is today had become a third world country, and its people became foreign citizens.

What are the implications of this disaster? Ask the family traveling the country and living out of their car, because they have no home to go back to. Ask the parents who have yet to be reunited with their children. Ask the mother who lost a son, and the son who lost a mother, because it took almost a week for the greatest military and the strongest government in the world to get to them. I think that one of the most important lessons of Katrina is that the greatest threat to our society, or well being, and our way of life does not lie in the Middle East. It lies within the limitations, indifferences, and prejudices of our own system.

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