Monday, September 12, 2005

From: melcher@nets.com Subject: When The Levee Breaks Date: September 12, 2005 8:01:50 PM MDT When The Levee Breaks "That mean ol' levee taught me to cry and moan." -Memphis Minnie An argument in defense of the government regarding its belated hurricane response is that there was no racism involved. President Bush, according to his wife, "cares for all Americans." Another argument is that the federal government wasn't in charge and that the privations of New Orleans' citizens were the fault of local and state officials. The stories coming out of Louisiana bear witness to a level of incompetence that borders on the criminal. As the months role by, and more than a million displaced people either find a new place in a strained civil order or the opportunity to return and rebuild, we will see a side of America that we've too long wanted to ignore. "That Americans would somehow in a color-affected way decide who to help and who not to help, I just don't believe it." --Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Friday, September 2 Was racism involved in the failure to rescue a major American city? In a nation infected by the de facto discrimination of people of color and real discrimination against the poor, an intentional policy of racism or classism is hardly necessary. The view from above, from the high perch of an elite cadre of rulers and functionaries may contradict in all aspects the experience of those on the ground or in the water. As we listen to the stories from the disaster a new sense of reality emerges. With the uncovering of the truth we may see what really lies underneath the surface of spin that too many Americans have come to accept as reality. The danger is that as the truth overflows its' carefully restricted banks an enormous quantity of pent-up rage could be released, and the challenge will be to direct that anger into passionate response that can deal honestly and fairly with the obstacles in our way. The alternative is very grim indeed. "This place is going to look like Little Somalia. We're going to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under control." --Brig. Gen. Gary Jones, commander of the Louisiana National Guard's Joint Task Force, Friday, September 2 We must confront the facts. Refugees from the flood in New Orleans were turned into criminals for trying to escape and to survive. The city was closed down, and only those who were fortunate or well connected were able to get away. People were directed to places of refuge that were unequipped to handle them. Routes of escape were blockaded. Buses that were promised did not arrive. Food and water were not provided and those who tried to fend for themselves were demonized or worse. Vigilantes were unleashed on a population struggling to survive. People died by the dozens in hospitals and nursing homes from dehydration. Who was in charge? When the governor of Louisiana declared a state of emergency on the friday before Katrina hit the federal government was in fact given full authority, BY LAW, to take charge of the situation. When the president on saturday concurred in that declaration the Federal Emergency Management Agency was officially IN CHARGE of the situation. As the disaster escalated, regulations governing the new Department of Homeland Security gave the federal agencies full power to take charge of the emergency situation EVEN IN THE ABSENCE OF STATE OR LOCAL REQUEST. True, the response of state and local authorities was abysmally inadequate, but the actions of a nation preoccupied with a war overseas and an obsession with political expediency is unforgivable. "The uneasy paradox which so many live with in this country - of being first-and-foremost rugged individuals, out to plunder what they can and paying as little tax as they can get away with, while at the same time believing that America is a robust, model society - has reached a crisis point this week...The country has to choose whether it wants to rebuild the levees and destroyed communities, with no expense spared for the future - or once again brush off that responsibility, and blame the other guy." - Mark Wells, BBC Bill O'Reilly warned that if you don't get an education and a good job in America you'll wind up poor and when you're in trouble help won't be coming anytime soon. His statements contribute to the impression that it's a crime to be poor in this country. To be poor and especially to be poor and black is to be essentially without the fundamental rights that Bill O'Reilly and his fan club take for granted. The problems in New Orleans he attributed to the breakdown of the social order and the spread of lawlessness. In a desperate situation when all authority has failed and survival has been placed in the hands of a disorganized citizenry the boundaries of the law become a subject for interpretation. "You aren't turning the West Bank into another Superdome." - The Sheriffs and police blocking refugees from crossing highway 90 on the way out of New Orleans. Ever since Ronald Reagan's "morning in America" we've dealt with poverty in our nation by pretending it doesn't exist. If the poor make too much noise we just put them in prisons. If we run out of prisons we build more. Prisons are one of the biggest growth industries in America. A bigger percentage of Americans are in prison than in any other industrial power. "I want the folks there on our Gulf Coast to know that the federal government is prepared to help you when the storm passes." --President Bush, Monday, August 29 As the waters very slowly recede in New Orleans some Americans would like to leave the flood behind in a fading sequence of passing news cycles or buried in endless and ongoing self serving investigations. The events of New Orleans resemble a tragedy in a distant third world nation. But Katrina has brought much of what we've hidden from ourselves too close to the surface to be ignored, and there is the matter of those refugees, who won't allow us for long to avoid the face that stares at us from the mirror. The hurricane brought us closer to the crest of a larger flood, one set in motion long ago and propelled by willful ignorance. Out of the hurricane, and the war, and a thousand different pressures building across the land we are witnessing a slow explosion of social consciousness, the likes of which America hasn't been willing to face in decades. "The good news is...that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast.... Out of the rubble of Trent Lott's house--he's lost his entire house--there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch." --President Bush, Friday, September 2 Over the past twenty years America has been turned into a cult. Those who don't share the social standing or viewpoint of the party in power are excluded, considered to be in some way inferior, outside the circle, not worthy of full recognition or rights. Those at the head of the line are considered, and consider themselves, essentially infallible, never themselves accountable because their every thought and action is the expression of a higher, transcendent power. To disagree is to be disloyal, a traitor, not worthy of sharing the sacred ground. Until now, about half the American voting public consists of those appear to be blind, deaf and dumb to anything that crosses the party line, a line that's continually redefined by some of the the most powerful and wide ranging voices of an ubiquitous and too often cooperative media. While many thousands of Americans open their hearts and pocketbooks to provide aid an intentionally crippled government puts its resources into war at the price of preparedness at home. At least a half million of the excluded, the poor and disadvantaged, people of other colors and of other faiths, having lost what little place they had on the margins of the American dream, now dwell in crowded amphitheaters, ballparks and makeshift refugee centers. Will they continue to be left behind, not by any sort of rapture, but by sheer neglect? Are these, the largest displaced population of poor and homeless since the Great Depression, expected to vanish? Will they be added to the poor sections of other American cities, already overburdened by joblessness crime and drug addiction? In the wake of this hurricane we've already seen on the news elements of an America willing to turn upon the victims. Is this America ready to deal with this magnitude of social dislocation? How long will poverty be blamed on the poor? "The guy who runs this building I'm in, emergency management...his mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home. And every day she called him and said, 'Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?' And he said, 'Yeah, Mama. Somebody's coming to get you. Somebody's coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Thursday. Somebody's coming to get you on Friday.' And she drowned Friday night. [Crying] And she drowned Friday night." --Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, Sunday, September 4 When I was of high school age I spent my summers in a young black community on the east side of Cleveland. We were brought together by Lyndon Johnson's "War On Poverty" as disadvantaged underachievers who had shown early promise but were being failed by conventional education. We lived and played on the beautiful campus of Case Western Reserve University, living in student dormitories, taking classes from enlightened teachers, supervised by a diverse mix of young graduate student counselors who introduced us to politics, music and a taste for culture that would otherwise have been hard to reach. The campus extended down from the wealthy heights out into the ghetto communities below, standing like a fortress of privilege against the poor. When the Hough and Glenville riots erupted in the summers of 1966 and 1968 the campus where I stayed was used as a staging area for the police and national guard. Cleveland, like most cities was divided down the middle into distinct racial and cultural enclaves. In a city with a large population of blacks I never saw a black person until I was about eight. Black neighborhoods were across the river in the oldest and most run down sections of town. They were the most recent immigrants in a city of immigrants and had not yet won the right to be treated as first class citizens. They suffered the highest rate of poverty and unemployment and the high rates of drug addiction and the crime rate that go along with it. This was the situation for too many decades of de facto segregation, where the northern white assumed that blacks, having been freed from forced labor after 200 years, had the same opportunity as whites to succeed in a 'free' society. As long as they kept to themselves and stayed out of white neighborhoods the 'problems' with blacks could be largely ignored or at least shuffled away to someone else's set of priorities. "People are now beginning to voice what we've all been seeing with our own eyes -- the majority of people left in New Orleans are black, they are poor, they are the underbelly of society. When you look at this, what does this say about where we are as a country and where our government is in terms of how it views the people of this country?" --Lester Holt of MSNBC, to House majority leader Tom DeLay, Friday, September 2. DeLay's response: "What it tells me is we're doing a wonderful job and we are an incredibly compassionate people." One night in 1968 a group of us had gone on a field trip way out in the country, to the newly constructed Blossom Center Amphitheater, to a concert by Judy Collins and Arlo Guthrie. We didn't get back until late and when we got to the dorms all of the lights were out and we were greeted at the doors when we knocked by an obviously frightened counselor who told us to come in and be quite and avoid standing by the windows. "There's somebody shooting out in the yard." We were bewildered as to what was going on that night, but I remember going up on the elevator to my floor and walking down the hall to my room and seeing a sight that's one of the formative experiences of my life. At the end of the hall was a corner room with a large picture window looking north over the neighborhoods and toward Lake Erie. A group of students sat silently watching, and the whole horizon of the city was filled with enormous leaping flames. This was one of formative experiences of my life, certainly of my political life. I witnessed the awesome destructive power of collective rage, to bring a city and a country face to face with itself. The unique diversity of New Orleans, where so many of the streams of American life flow out to meet the larger ocean, gave birth to jazz, a uniquely American music, and in many ways it was a birth place for much in the American soul. Yet, so many of its citizens are to this day not treated as full members of the club. Too much of the soul of our America has been sacrificed in the name of expediency and profits. When George W. Bush speaks about rebuilding New Orleans does he mean replacing only the casinos, condominiums and oil refineries, or will he allow the fullness of its culture, born out of slavery and poverty and immigration and struggle to reassert itself? Was Hurricane Katrina a program for urban renewal on a massive scale, to replace the heart of the people with some gentrified Republican theme park? The people who made the heart and culture of New Orleans are now in exile, and I know that they won't be kept away without a struggle. "We're angry, Mr. President, and we'll be angry long after our beloved city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry. Our people deserved rescuing. Many who could have been were not. That's to the government's shame." --Open letter to Bush from theNew Orleans Times-Picayune editorial board, Sunday, September 4 At our political conventions we parade people of color to demonstrate our transcendence of race and class. These subjects have become virtually taboo in the house of our political culture. Since Katrina, however, anyone can see the huge elephants making a shambles of the rooms. In the coming political and cultural storms it will be impossible to keep these factors out of sight and out of mind. I expect the wars that we have chosen to fight abroad will finally be coming home. I've seen what that war can look like. "New Orleans now is abortion-free. New Orleans now is Mardi Gras-free. New Orleans now is free of Southern decadence and the sodomites, the witchcraft workers, false religion--it's free of all of those things now. God simply, I believe, in His mercy purged all of that stuff out of there--and now we're going to start over again." --The Rev. Bill Shanks, pastor of New Covenant Fellowship of New Orleans, Friday, September 2 *quotations taken from "New Orleans, Voices in the Storm", The Nation Magazine on the Web, Sept. 9, 2005 _______________________________ "Our rulers have insisted by both word and deed that the laws of physics and chemistry do not apply to us. That delusion will now start to vanish. Katrina marks Year One of our new calendar, the start of an age in which the physical world has flipped from sure and secure to volatile and unhinged. New Orleans doesn't look like the America we've lived in. But it very much resembles the planet we will inhabit for the rest of our lives." - Bill Mckibben (full essay at: http://www.grist.org/comments/soapbox/2005/09/07/mckibben/index.html) ______________ 8:08:57 PM    comment []