“Where are you from?” asked the American man as we boarded the airliner.
“I’m from New Orleans,” I said, and I heard the “friendly” fade in his Midwestern voice. “Oh,” he replied. “Well, I hear things there are getting a lot better!”
Funny. I keep hearing that, too. But I decided to tell the truth about New Orleans: “No, that’s not true. Things are not getting better.” His response was a long defense of President George W. Bush, followed by a diatribe on the incorrigible, intransigent corruption plaguing Louisiana in general and New Orleans in particular, which tells you how much of America views the tragedy wrought by Hurricane Katrina.
They think it’s our fault.
I explain: “The storm didn’t touch my Gentilly house. I didn’t lose even a roof shingle. The only window broken was the one FEMA broke, to see if there were any bodies in the attic. My house and thousands of other homes and everything inside and outside them were instead destroyed by the catastrophic flood that followed the day after the hurricane.” He nods: “Yes, it was horrible when the water came in over the levees.”
I shake my head: “No, that’s the biggest lie. Almost everywhere there were earthen levees, the city didn’t flood. It flooded where they’d stopped building up earthen levees, and instead gave us a flimsy floodwall that the Army Corps of Engineers designed but knew was completely inadequate.”
The Midwestern man fidgets. But we’re in line and he cannot escape. “Well,” he says, archly, “I heard that President Bush allocated all the money necessary for adequate floodwalls, and Louisiana spent it all on casinos.”
“Who told you that?” I ask, incredulously. He shrugs: “I read it somewhere.”
“That’s so not true.” He then blames former President Bill Clinton.
I know what he wants to hear. Midwestern man wants to hear that New Orleans is fine, we’re moving along, America’s strong, and Bush is a great, great president. But I’ve been out of my home for almost a full year now, with every possession I couldn’t fit into my car lost, my job gone, and my son’s school closed. I’ve been helped by strangers, friends, and family and I ‘m not complaining.
But I won’t lie, either.
“Things are going terribly wrong in New Orleans,” I tell Midwestern man, “and it’s a huge failure of American government,” I pause, “and your American town could be next.” He changes the subject to Katrina’s real heroes — the many individuals who didn’t lose heart when they and all around them were losing everything — people rescued others, shared food and water, coaxed the helpless off roofs and out of attics and brought them somewhere safer. The real lesson of Hurricane Katrina? That we are all responsible for one another. This is the essence of our humanity. So why, a year after the storm, are we still in such a sorry way?
Because the heroic struggle by individuals was not matched in any way by either state or federal government — at any level.
Louisiana’s failures are definitely part of Katrina’s legacy. Who can forget Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco’s sluggish posturing over the National Guard? New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin simply disappeared for more than three days. And Sen. Mary Landrieu demanded embarrassingly unconscionable amounts of money to rebuild, what, sugar cane processing plants and catfish farms. Midwestern man nods approvingly. But Louisiana’s a poor state. “Mississippi’s poorer,” Midwestern man countered, “and they’ve recovered faster.” Yes, but Katrina hit New Orleans’ poorest areas, whereas Mississippi’s coastline with its heavily insured hotels and casinos is its wealthiest area. And Mississippi seems better connected to the Republicans running Washington. Could that be because their leadership is Republican, and Louisiana’s isn’t?
“Perhaps it’s more a fundamental flaw in character,” Midwestern man sniffs. But surely that fundamental flaw applies more to Republicans in federal government who showed nothing but singular ineptness during Hurricane Katrina. FEMA’s “Heckovajob, Brownie” was the most egregious example of the general insipidness, cronyism, overconfidence, clumsiness, and just plain lack of attention presently afflicting our federal government in everything it touches, be it Katrina, Afghanistan, or Iraq.
“So you’re saying Katrina opened the federal cupboard, and the cupboard was bare,” says Midwestern man.
“Not just bare,” I reply. “There are snakes in the cupboard.”
Want to clean house? It’s time.
