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In New Orleans, Kindness Trumped Chaos: Lessons of Dedication, Solidarity, Love, and Recovery, Five Years After Katrina
The taxi driver called me "girlfriend" and "sweetheart" with the familiar sweetness of New Orleanians, so I figured I could ask a few personal questions. He was from the Lower Ninth Ward, one of the neighborhoods inundated by Katrina--a mostly poor, mostly black edge of the city isolated and imperiled by two manmade canals--and it had taken him three and a half years to return to New Orleans. He still wasn't in his neighborhood, but he was back in the city, and his family was back, and they were determined to come back all the way.
What happened in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is more remarkable than almost anyone has told. More than a million volunteers came to New Orleans to gut houses, rebuild, and stand in solidarity with the people who endured not just a hurricane but a deluge of Bush Administration incompetence and institutionalized racism at all levels of government, which temporarily turned the drowned city into a prison. Supplies were not allowed in by a panicky government; people were not allowed out, and a wholly unnatural crisis ensued.
Even so, an astounding wave of solidarity and empathy arose. At Hurricanehousing.org more than 200,000 people volunteered to shelter evacuees, often in their own homes. And then there were those legions of volunteers, many of them white, working in a city that had been two-thirds black.
I have again and again met passionate young activists who intended to come for a week or a month and never left. In the Lower Ninth, my taxi driver's neighborhood, things looked better than even six months before. Brad Pitt's Make It Right Foundation now has dozens of solar-powered homes, built on stilts for the next inundation, scattered across the lowlands of the neighborhood. New businesses have opened on St. Claude Avenue, the main thoroughfare, and children play in the once-abandoned streets.
It's hard to say that there is a recipe for solidarity across race and class lines. During crises, the official reaction from government and media is often widespread fear--based on a belief that in the absence of institutional authority people revert to Hobbesian selfishness and violence, or just feckless conduct. Scholars Lee Clarke and Karon Chess call this fear of the public, particularly the poor and nonwhite public, "elite panic." Because these "elites" shape reaction as well as opinion, their beliefs can be deadly.
But the truth is that most people are altruistic, resourceful, and constructive during crisis. A disaster is actually threatening to elites, not because the response is selfish but because it often unfolds like a revolution, in which the status quo has evaporated.
Civil society improvises its own systems of survival--community kitchens, clinics, neighborhood councils, and networks of volunteers and survivors--often decentralized and deeply empowering for the individuals involved. What gets called recovery can constitute the counter-revolution--the taking back of power.
Perhaps the biggest question for a disaster like Katrina is to what extent this transformed sense of self and society lasts and matters: Can it be a foundation for a stronger civil society, more solidarity, and grassroots power? It has been so in many ways in New Orleans, with groups like the Common Ground Clinic--a free health clinic that was started days after the hurricane and is still going strong five years later.
One important tool for future disasters, and social change in the absence of disaster, is simply knowledge of what really happened: how many people in the hours, days, weeks and months after Katrina behaved with courage, love, and creativity, and how much they constituted the majority response. Such human capacities can be an extraordinary resource not just in crisis but in realizing our dearest hopes for a stronger society and more meaningful lives.
Katrina is hardly a happy story. More than 1,600 people died. The racism on the part of the media, the authorities ready to believe any rumor, and the vigilantes who took it upon themselves to regard any black man as a looter and to administer the death penalty for these imagined minor property crimes were a reminder of how ugly this country can be and how much remains to be done. The city used the disaster as an excuse to shut down most of the public housing even though much of it was undamaged and intact housing was desperately needed.
Poverty continues, and so does racism; the South did not stop being the South or America America. And the BP spill menaces the region in a way that is even more ominous than Katrina. The hurricane was after all a kind of event that has come ashore for tens of thousands of years, and when it was over people could rebuild. What can be done to ameliorate the spill is still a mystery, and the coastal edge of Louisiana, with its diverse fishing and foraging cultures and its abundance of wildlife, is poisoned.
New Orleans will never be quite the city it was. People there lost what many of us have not had for generations: deep roots in place, a strong sense of culture, and an intricate web of social ties to family and community, whether it's a church, Mardi Gras krewe, musical group, black social aid and pleasure club, or neighborhood group. Much was reclaimed; many returned, but some did not or cannot.
The taxi driver took us to the New Orleans Convention Center, where so many people, mostly African American, had been stranded in the days after Hurricane Katrina. But that day in July, it was hosting the Essence Festival, a black music festival at which tens of thousands of people in summer splendor circulated. Among the mix of booths were several from organizations founded during the weeks and months after the storm but still going strong.
Traveling through a vibrant New Orleans not quite five years after the city was pronounced dead means understanding what dedication, will, solidarity, and love can achieve. This year of disasters--the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, the volcano in Iceland, the spill in the Gulf, the floods and heat waves and droughts and rising waters--remind all of us that we are entering an era where disaster will be common and intense. Survival will be grounded in understanding our own capacity for power and resilience, creativity, and solidarity.
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20 Comments so far
Show AllWORST OF TIMES -- BRING OUT THE WORST IN PEOPLE
Katrina according to Naomi Klein.
www.naomiklein.org/
Katrina according to FlashPoints.
www.flashpoints.org/
Katrina according to Al Jazeera News.
http://english.aljazeera.net/
For surely the purpose of this world is to prove the harm in it, and when things cannot possibly get any worse, then all things will turn toward the good.
Great posts Jusice Arcs!
I have always said that you cannot actually create darkness, you can only remove light. And i have always agreed with MLK's assessment of justice arcs. Oh. That's right. Your name is a homage, isn't it? ;-)
Which, now that i think of it, may be relevant to the current study of 'dark energy'. But that would be a whole other discussion.........
namaste
rita
"The LORD saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time" Genesis 6:5
NOT ACCORDING TO THE POOR
The white High Society of New Orleans, the super rich that have always hand picked most all the politicians and police chief in New Orleans, they used the Katrina disaster to commit exit-genocide of the poor blacks and all the homeless.
First the police were ordered to execute a few poor blacks in each of the many slum neighborhoods, then the fear driven poor were loaded in buses and dumped off in the most ungodly of places, such as Houston Texas a four hour drive straight west, a city with the worst crime rate in the nation.
“The Common Ground Clinic--a free health clinic
that was started days after the hurricane and is
still going strong five years later.”
But what about that gigantic community hospital, the only hospital that served the poor in New Orleans? Was it not lightly damaged by Katrina and ready to except patients just three days after the flood? To this day still sitting vacant -- why?
Surely a fiction fairy tale is this article, a short novel of what should have happened, but what our greedy High Society refused to allow happen.
Bring America Back !!!!
**New Orleans was an Atrocity waiting to happen. Many Federal officials, Congress, Corps of Engineers, Louisiana State officials, City of New Orleans officials knew, Not IF but When the right size storm came in, their protective
levee systems were in grave danger of breaking.
**Sadly, N.O. was a city built in a soup bowl, with nowhere for the soup to go. They all knew the levees needed to be modernized, and rebuttressed in the foreboding that some day a Katrina would come along.
**Seems the story is that the projects, funding, and plans just never reached the 'serious stage' for the levee reconstruction, so whose fault was that ????
**Never mind that there was no Plan 'B', because the gross negligence is that there was never even a Plan 'A' to deal with mass failure of the levees. Many, if not all those officials mentioned above, merely allowed the false assumption that the levees would hold. Katrina was the nightmare which disproved that assumption.
**While the milk of human kindness surely surfaced nationwide to assist the victims of Katrina, does this then somehow forgive and ameliorate the sheer human neglect which caused it ? Five years late, it is good to recognize the shining stars who came willing to make N.O. whole again.
**Last week there were news segments of US Corps of Engineers officials advising and explaining to city survivors how the repaired levees were perfect in design
sufficient to hold against the worst storm surges imaginable.
**One lady survivor commented on the nicety of the engineers' explanations, but then decided she would not
give up her Prayers that the levees not be tested again.
Far better it would've been that all this hope, inspiration,
and caring caused reconstruction of the levees before Katrina came along five years hence. But, as in this piece, it makes for great feel-good stories !
**Thank you for your learned comment...indeed; the seeds are barely
sprouted for the lessons we need to learn. Lady Liberty watched 3 skyscrapers
being demolished on 9/11, in lower Manhattan, the truth of which has yet
to surface. Nine years later, those who do not remember the past,
are condemned to repeat it. May the force be with you.
What was a fairly good article..."Poverty continues, and so does racism; the South did not stop being the South or America America" simply turnned into another hate mongering, south is racist not like us pure Norther folks.
Disgusting. Look at where the Katrina folks are now, right now to see where they were not welcome. Where when they showed up, they were shown the door.
Thois kind of bigoted thinking grows tiresome and its becoming embarrasing for those that indulge in it.
Bigotry and racism are not confined to the Beck's of the world obviously.
This disaster brought out America's finest people that helped a neighbor get up to fight on again. People came from across our great nation to volunteer and give what they were able to in this epic human tragedy . I salute you all , my heart goes out to all of the little guys that never stood so tall and all of the big guys that donated funds and performed at events that raised funds and spirits of many Americans in a time of need.
A FAKE MORALITY -- ALWAYS ARCS TOWARD INJUSTICE
Justice Arcs
“the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice….
the natural togetherness that ALL of HUMANITY innately
possess and abundantly share with each other… most people
are altruistic, resourceful, and constructive during crisis.”
LIGHT
I can see no logical purpose for this world except to reach the ultimate conclusion of injustice. Not until then will there be a true morality that bends toward justice.
Your argument may be valid, that the purpose of this world is also to bring out the good inherent in all of us, but you need to prove it, for in 70 years on this earth I have yet to see a single example of it.
For mutual gratification, in a disaster helping others to survive so you can survive, by no stretch of the imagination can this be love. For love is a giving action that produces a grateful response, and in a world filled with ingrates this is a near impossible thing to accomplish.
For most everyone feels they deserve to be rich, surely a fake morality, for what a man feels he deserves, this is his high watermark in life to achieve, and it controls every aspect of his mind, character and personality.
I entirely agree with the above posters that recognize the Katrina disaster as virtually man-made. My wife and I spent three weeks as volunteers in a evacuee shelter in Jennings, Louisiana. The stories we heard were of unrelieved horror and brutality on the part of almost everyone connected with civil authority, and most especially the police. The police, for whatever reason, probably cowardice, refused to enter the flooded areas, and because it was presumably too dangerous for them, they permitted on one else to enter either. It was no mystery that patients were perishing in flooded hospitals; relatives who arrived with boats to fetch them were stopped by armed roadblocks. Wal-Mart attempted to deliver a trailer truck load of bottled water to the convention center where thousands were trapped without food, water or toilets for six days and were prevented from doing so. The people in the convention center were never trapped by water, they were trapped by the police! The BARBARIANS OF GRETNA, LOUISIANA blocked the bridge that easily led from the disaster area to relief by closing the bridge and firing live rounds over the heads of anyone attempting to escape. Universally, the evacuees, white or black, were regarded as no more than a security problem to be feared. However, let me mention the truly good people of Jennings, Louisana, who converted their county fair grounds into an evacuee shelter on their own authority and bore the full cost of the venture. FEMA AND THE RED CROSS HAD NO MEANINGFUL PRESENCE IN THIS EFFORT, TOTALLY ABSENT.
Tony Vodvarka
TONY: Thank you for the report, as well as your decency and humanity.
One gets the feeling this is the new Modus Operandi, an environmentally "assisted" version of YOY. People learn to work together to survive, or die waiting for the deliverance (in theory, government-financed) that never arrives. Then, the Disaster Capitalism vultures sweep down to consume the remains and make the area their own!
As you say, Siouxrose, we have a non-functional government, except when it is corporations that need support. It may be worse than that. In the first place, Katrina was not the monster storm the media portrayed, it was a catagory one when it came ashore, and the levees were on the weaker side of the storm. Some have speculated that the levees may have been dynamited. There were said to be reports of explosions when the tidal surge was at its peak. This would not be without precedent. In the middle 1920s, a great flood threatened New Orleans and to relieve the pressure on the higher value real estate (white), they breached with dynamite the levees protecting the black neighborhoods. In those days, such a tactic was considered natural and needed no explanation.
I have to disagree with the thrust of this article, and it's about all this wonderful "Southern hospitality" which I grew up with. Please! Give it a rest! It's a fraud from one end to the other. The official policy of the power elites of New Orleans was to ethnically cleanse it of black people especially poor ones. Let's stop being so naive. Power elites in this country have the ethics of that lower than rat do do as my paternal grand father would say-- just to make clear I'm not in the least naive about power elites in the rest of the USA. They have no principles and they put keeping power and privilege above all else.
AD