There has been a certain grim amusement, these past few days, in reading
the various paens to New Orleans. In this newspaper, it has been
described as a “great and graceful city,” and compared to Venice for its
“beauty and tenuousness.” Portraits elsewhere have been equally
flattering, painting it — or at least, what it was until this week — as
the Deep South’s easygoing, hard-partying, jazz-loving,
European-influenced oasis.
As a fan of the Big Easy — one who’s been there several times, and
planned to go back shortly — I’ve seen all those things in it, too. But
what we’re talking about is only one side of the city, belonging to
tourists and the well-heeled. The real New Orleans, for most of the
people who live there, is poor and rough and rife with corruption. And
it’s that side, more than the other, that’s relevant to the tragic
events that have unfolded in Hurricane Katrina’s wake.
In fact, it’s not just a different side of New Orleans that we’ve seen
this week — it’s a different side of America. This is not the country
those of us on the outside have come to know — the brazen, optimistic,
infallible one of Manhattan or California or... well, the French
Quarter. This is the one that’s haphazardly run, massively polarized
according to class and especially race, and scraping by day-to-day
instead of building for what’s on the horizon. And it’s the one that
can’t cope with a natural disaster that everyone knew was coming sooner
or later.
The saddest thing about what has unfolded is that it’s not, as the
networks once told us, an act of nature, so much as the result of human
error and negligence. It’s something we never would have seen in
America’s affluent northern cities had they been faced with the
potential for disaster that the Crescent City always lived under.
Every hurricane season, we were reminded that this was a city that could
potentially be wiped out by the perfect storm. And yet, watching New
Orleans descend into lawless Third-World conditions following a
hurricane that didn’t even hit it directly, it’s been painfully obvious
that nobody — not the inept municipal and state governments, and not the
far-removed feds — gave much thought to what the threat actually meant.
There are so many questions to be asked that one scarcely knows where to
begin. But three simple ones cut to the heart of the matter:
When a city lies below sea level in a hurricane zone, with levees the
only thing standing between it and certain disaster, how can those
levees not be routinely upgraded to withstand the worst Mother Nature
has to offer? Blame has been laid largely with the Bush administration
for slashing planned funding for the Army Corps of Engineers to work on
the levees, but needed upgrades have been ignored for decades. Despite
constant warnings that New Orleans could face a Category 4 hurricane,
the levees were only suited to withstand a Category 3.
When a city has among the highest natural disaster potentials in North
America, how can no detailed emergency plan be in place? With one of the
United States’ poorest populations, there was no evacuation strategy for
those who didn’t have their own means of transportation and a ready
place to go. There was no policing strategy to deal with the inevitable
situation in which lines of communication broke down and looting broke
out. And between the three levels of government, there wasn’t a single
person or body ready and entrusted to take charge — not the shrill,
panicked mayor, not the chief of police, not the governor, not a senior
military official... nobody.
When one of its cities is on the brink of chaos — and beyond — how is
it possible for the world’s most powerful nation to take five days to
properly respond? How can the destitute be left without food or water in
shelters, dying patients be left in hospitals without power, water or
supplies, search-and-rescue missions be abandoned for lack of security
manpower and sandbags be left undropped because expected aircraft never
arrived?
There will be many responses to these questions — excuses, apologies,
denials. But the simple answer to all is that, until it was far too
late, these people and their city — so far removed from the other
America — were never enough of a priority.
There are fingers being pointed, deservedly so, at the current
administration. But the neglect that ultimately left New Orleans to rot
transcends political lines, Democratic politicians failing the victims
with their lack of planning as much as the President with his tepid
response.
There has been hope expressed that the disaster’s upside will be to
finally push America’s race and class issues into the spotlight. But the
effect might just as easily be to push the two Americas further apart.
If members of the less privileged America were dangerously alienated
before, one shudders to think how they’ll feel now.
