Brandon (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} jolinn) wrote,@ 2005-09-02 00:01:00 |
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The Death of a City?
"Have we come full circle, now? Is every tragedy once again the result of bad actions?"
My best friend said that to me today, when the German environmental minister was trying to make political hay out of Katrina, implying that our failure to sign Kyoto was good evidence that "we deserved what we got".
If there's one lesson I would extract from modern society: from media, from politics, and from people, is that we should never lose fact of the fact that most of what we see is shaped by our desire for Story. We want a single, unifying thread to warp and weave through the chaos of the world, giving it structure. It's who we are, and it's what our brains are evolved to do. So my initial reaction was that it's too quick to make any sort of judgement, and that people should focus on fixing the problem.
But I've heard too much from friends, from people in New Orleans, from people in Baton Rouge, and in my time in New Orleans for me to think that this is just a random tragedy. What we see in New Orleans need not have been -- and intuitively I think people know this.
*
My freshman year of college, two friends of mine were waiting at a bus stop two blocks from campus, and they were mugged at gunpoint.
What happened?
They were waiting on their bus, and the local middle school left out. A kid, wearing a dress uniform, pointed a gun at my friends and demanded their wallets.
That same year, 471 people in the city were murdered. Near the end of the year, the city newspaper began running a count of the number slain, and you would see copies of the Times Picayune with the number in bold on the front cover. In a city with 500,000 people, you couldn't go a day without having a murder. Some days, you couldn't even make it to lunch before you had a murder.
The campus newspaper had a weekly crime reports section (the debate was over what to call it -- 'crime on campus' wasn't enough, since you also had to cover crime on students off campus). The scariest story I read concerned a young black man who was standing next to a dorm on the main drag through campus. It read: "a convertible stopped by the man, and a party of young men jumped ouf the car and began beating the young man. He was knocked unconscious and stuffed in the trunk of the car, which drove off before it could be identified"
My junior year, two blocks from where I live, a man was shot in the face on his front lawn.
*
Everywhere I went in New Orleans, it seemed like I could find a slum, if I stepped just a pace off the main drag. Every city has its poor areas, but New Orleans seemed excessive -- most of these places were where the shootings were happening, so it wasn't something that exactly encouraged exploration. I also saw warehouse after warehouse, abandoned and left to rot. When I asked, I was told that even though the city was willing to essentially *give* these places away, the requirement was they be restored to match their historical state. This was almost never worth the money, so these places lay fallow, more places for criminals and the homeless to congregate.
*
One of the first things I was warned about in New Orleans was the police. "Don't mess with them!" I thought, "Oh, they mean, don't break the law around them -- no problem!". In reality, stories of abuse and corruption by the New Orleans police department were legion. I heard stories of abuse, saw evidence of crimes covered up, saw minor infractions treated with abusiveness (particularly at Mardi Gras), and the year after I graduated, a 'cleanup' of the NOPD resulted in the chief and half the force being kicked off.
*
My sophomore year, a friend of mine told me how he'd heard this story from meteorologists: "The real worst case scenario would be a hurricane that hits New Orleans, then ends up dumping Lake Ponchartain into the city. Most of the city is in a bowl, so it would flood and then there would no easy way to get all the water out. There would be untold devestation."
The year was 1994.
*
Our President made the argument to us in an infamous state of the Union address that the safety of our nation depended on invading Iraq. Weapons of mass destruction were cited. Terrorism and links to 9/11 were invoked. Our success in the first Gulf War was recalled.
The President's Secretary of State, Colin Powell, said that invading a country was like the most fragile items in a china shop. "If you break it, you buy it".
We invaded Iraq. Colin Powell resigned.
The total resources we have allocated to this war number in the hundreds of billions. The human capital is in the hundreds of thousands. The national guard is stretched thin -- thinner than it has been since the Korean War.
*
FEMA (The Federal emergency management agency) reported in early 2001 that the three greatest emergencies the US could face were as follows:
- A terrorist attack on New York
- A massive earthquake in San Francisco
- A catastrophic hurricane hitting New Orleans
Articles about the dangers to New Orleans were written:
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/e
Meanwhile, the budget to the army corp of engineers was slashed. Proposals to preserve (or restore) coastal land which had historically blocked the brunt of hurricanes were tabled owing to lack of funding. Meanwhile, the party of "small government" approved projects like a 250 million dollar bridge to an island with fifty people in Alaska.
*
Meanwhile, local government, representing the party of "large government", evidently had no plan for the city. There
were no buses chartered to evacuate the poor. There were insufficient police or officials to go door to door to convince people to leave. The evacuation order was not given until Saturday. The only real shelters were a handful of schools and the superdome, none of which were equipped to survive punishing windows or the catastrophic flood that followed.
Scant emergency supplies, no working evacuation plan, and absolutely no plan to deal with the levees breaking.
*
What I saw and heard of New Orleans this week was something out of a nightmare.
Roving gangs of looters roamed New Orleans' streets. Police looted. People in the 'evacuation' areas went days without food and water. People drowned as millions of gallons of water rushed into the city. That same water brings with it disease, chemical waste, and destruction that we have not seen in an American city since the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.
The heroes, the people risking their lives to rescue people from houses and to bring supplies into the city, were shot at.
Today, the Speaker of the House publically wondered whether we should rebuild New Orleans at all.
*
Can we really believe this tragedy "just happened"?
Didn't think so.
"Have we come full circle, now? Is every tragedy once again the result of bad actions?"
My best friend said that to me today, when the German environmental minister was trying to make political hay out of Katrina, implying that our failure to sign Kyoto was good evidence that "we deserved what we got".
If there's one lesson I would extract from modern society: from media, from politics, and from people, is that we should never lose fact of the fact that most of what we see is shaped by our desire for Story. We want a single, unifying thread to warp and weave through the chaos of the world, giving it structure. It's who we are, and it's what our brains are evolved to do. So my initial reaction was that it's too quick to make any sort of judgement, and that people should focus on fixing the problem.
But I've heard too much from friends, from people in New Orleans, from people in Baton Rouge, and in my time in New Orleans for me to think that this is just a random tragedy. What we see in New Orleans need not have been -- and intuitively I think people know this.
*
My freshman year of college, two friends of mine were waiting at a bus stop two blocks from campus, and they were mugged at gunpoint.
What happened?
They were waiting on their bus, and the local middle school left out. A kid, wearing a dress uniform, pointed a gun at my friends and demanded their wallets.
That same year, 471 people in the city were murdered. Near the end of the year, the city newspaper began running a count of the number slain, and you would see copies of the Times Picayune with the number in bold on the front cover. In a city with 500,000 people, you couldn't go a day without having a murder. Some days, you couldn't even make it to lunch before you had a murder.
The campus newspaper had a weekly crime reports section (the debate was over what to call it -- 'crime on campus' wasn't enough, since you also had to cover crime on students off campus). The scariest story I read concerned a young black man who was standing next to a dorm on the main drag through campus. It read: "a convertible stopped by the man, and a party of young men jumped ouf the car and began beating the young man. He was knocked unconscious and stuffed in the trunk of the car, which drove off before it could be identified"
My junior year, two blocks from where I live, a man was shot in the face on his front lawn.
*
Everywhere I went in New Orleans, it seemed like I could find a slum, if I stepped just a pace off the main drag. Every city has its poor areas, but New Orleans seemed excessive -- most of these places were where the shootings were happening, so it wasn't something that exactly encouraged exploration. I also saw warehouse after warehouse, abandoned and left to rot. When I asked, I was told that even though the city was willing to essentially *give* these places away, the requirement was they be restored to match their historical state. This was almost never worth the money, so these places lay fallow, more places for criminals and the homeless to congregate.
*
One of the first things I was warned about in New Orleans was the police. "Don't mess with them!" I thought, "Oh, they mean, don't break the law around them -- no problem!". In reality, stories of abuse and corruption by the New Orleans police department were legion. I heard stories of abuse, saw evidence of crimes covered up, saw minor infractions treated with abusiveness (particularly at Mardi Gras), and the year after I graduated, a 'cleanup' of the NOPD resulted in the chief and half the force being kicked off.
*
My sophomore year, a friend of mine told me how he'd heard this story from meteorologists: "The real worst case scenario would be a hurricane that hits New Orleans, then ends up dumping Lake Ponchartain into the city. Most of the city is in a bowl, so it would flood and then there would no easy way to get all the water out. There would be untold devestation."
The year was 1994.
*
Our President made the argument to us in an infamous state of the Union address that the safety of our nation depended on invading Iraq. Weapons of mass destruction were cited. Terrorism and links to 9/11 were invoked. Our success in the first Gulf War was recalled.
The President's Secretary of State, Colin Powell, said that invading a country was like the most fragile items in a china shop. "If you break it, you buy it".
We invaded Iraq. Colin Powell resigned.
The total resources we have allocated to this war number in the hundreds of billions. The human capital is in the hundreds of thousands. The national guard is stretched thin -- thinner than it has been since the Korean War.
*
FEMA (The Federal emergency management agency) reported in early 2001 that the three greatest emergencies the US could face were as follows:
- A terrorist attack on New York
- A massive earthquake in San Francisco
- A catastrophic hurricane hitting New Orleans
Articles about the dangers to New Orleans were written:
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/e
Meanwhile, the budget to the army corp of engineers was slashed. Proposals to preserve (or restore) coastal land which had historically blocked the brunt of hurricanes were tabled owing to lack of funding. Meanwhile, the party of "small government" approved projects like a 250 million dollar bridge to an island with fifty people in Alaska.
*
Meanwhile, local government, representing the party of "large government", evidently had no plan for the city. There
were no buses chartered to evacuate the poor. There were insufficient police or officials to go door to door to convince people to leave. The evacuation order was not given until Saturday. The only real shelters were a handful of schools and the superdome, none of which were equipped to survive punishing windows or the catastrophic flood that followed.
Scant emergency supplies, no working evacuation plan, and absolutely no plan to deal with the levees breaking.
*
What I saw and heard of New Orleans this week was something out of a nightmare.
Roving gangs of looters roamed New Orleans' streets. Police looted. People in the 'evacuation' areas went days without food and water. People drowned as millions of gallons of water rushed into the city. That same water brings with it disease, chemical waste, and destruction that we have not seen in an American city since the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.
The heroes, the people risking their lives to rescue people from houses and to bring supplies into the city, were shot at.
Today, the Speaker of the House publically wondered whether we should rebuild New Orleans at all.
*
Can we really believe this tragedy "just happened"?
Didn't think so.
