Such a range of emotions we feel watching the horrors of Katrina's destruction and aftermath! The anxiety of life-threatening forces as the storm approached, the shock of its intensity, the fear as it unleahed its fury, the pathos of imagining the suffering and loss of life and property throughout the region all ran their course in our minds and hearts.
Then we saw the results come in with the emerging day: the unbelievable devastation and two-story deep debris, the flooded cities, farms, towns and parishes, then the human suffering: hundreds swept away and gone, thousands more clinging perilously to life wherever they could gain footing or hang on till help could arrive. We saw a thousand stories of heroism in a day. We saw the best of our humanity, over and over.
Then we saw the worst of our evil within as the gangs of looters rampaged freely through homes and businesses, openly battling with weakened police authority, taking whatever they could get or wanted with no conscience or remose whatsoever. Without electric power as people opened up windows and evacuated, opportunists moved in and helped themselves.
Today I was in tears as hundreds tried to locate missing loved ones and described to CNN where they were last seen, many not to be seen again. Has anyone seen my husband, father, mother, son, daughter, or other loved one? He was in Biloxi, New Orleans, Gulfport, Metarie, or any of a hundred other places the last time he called me Sunday. He was afraid to stay but couldn't evacuate anymore; it was too late. He would hope for the best and try to ride it out. Can someone please tell me where he is and if he is allright. No phone. No cellphone transmission. No power. No food. No water. No safety or authority possible to serve or protect. No way to communicate, even no computers or internet!
We have established a society that is nearly paralyzed with dependency on our utilities, our oil and gas, our government systems. When something happens to us, these help us recover. But Katrina overwhelmed our backup as well.
I watched tired governors struggle to try to brace their citizens to endure, to hope, to help each other survive, and to try to keep from crying on camera. The usual bravado of "Help is on the way" was shown to depend on support and emergency systems that were clearly overmatched by the enormity of the task. It seems like total societal breakdown, but the worst of our behavior does not go unobserved, and neither does the best.
As bad as Katrina's devastating tragedy is, there are benefits which can result from it if its many lessons are taken to heart and respected. It showed us our weaknesses and our strengths on many levels as few events have in recent memory.
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About a year ago, I watched a show on the Discovery Channel. It was part of a series on disasters, each show focusing on a different type of disaster -- tornado, earthquake, tsunami, hurricane, and so forth.
Each show focused on three events -- one past, one fairly current, and one projected in the future. For the show on hurricanes, the events were the 1900 Galveston hurricane, Hurricane Andrew, and a projected direct hurricane hit on New Orleans.
The Discovery Channel often sensationalizes events, going for emotional impact over exact accuracy, so I discounted its predictions. What was predicted in the show that I watched was that in the event of a Category 3 or higher hurricane, New Orleans was going to be in trouble. Wind wouldn't be so much of a problem, but water would. The pumping systems that usually keep the below-sea-level city dry wouldn't be able to cope with all of the rainfall. Worse, the levees protecting the city from surrounding bodies of water would probably fail, creating even worse flooding that would be far beyond the capacity of the pumps, which would probably also fail as well.
Worse, according to this show I watched last summer, the powers-that-be in New Orleans had NO evacuation plan for the lower-income neighborhoods. Anyone who didn't have a car wouldn't be able to evacuate -- the plan was that, if waters rose, these people were to go to upper floors of multi-story buildings.
I dismissed what I saw on television last summer as sensationalist hype, typical of much of what I've seen on the Discovery Channel. But now it's actually happening. New Orleans did get hit by a hurricane, and it's the poor folk that are getting shafted. They're the ones who are still sitting on their roofs waiting to be rescued, or sitting in the Superdome with no electricity or functioning plumbing (and apparently no portable toilets either).
Some of the problems can be traced to an inability of even the best technology to pump the floodwaters away. And some problems can be attributed to not having enough money to make the levees and other flood-prevention measures strong enough.
But when the problem is that the political powers-that-be wouldn't allocate enough resources into enabling lower-income people to evacuate the way more wealthy people could, that's criminal.
I agree. Even during the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century, Marie Antoinette said, when told the people were starving, "Let them eat cake." The well-off have almost always gotten provided for better than the poor. Do you think that perhaps prompts (or justifies) the looting?
Well, actually, what Marie Antoinette was told was that the poor people were protesting because they didn't have any bread, and her response was that if they didn't have any bread, they should eat cake instead. There was a total disconnect between her perception and the actual reality.
I don't know, however, that the way in which the haves ignore the needs of the have-nots justifies the looting. Certainly, I would say that, since relief efforts are unable to bring sufficient supplies of food, water, and other necessities into the area, stealing such resources is completely justified. Carting off vast quantities of name-brand athletic shoes and designer clothing is more questionable. Those commodities are not necessary to survival.
On the other hand, I can see that the people who got shafted by the system might want to take revenge. I wouldn't consider that motivation to be justification, but I would consider it to be a mitigating factor.
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