Back to Normal?

I was offended by this cartoon at first, but having watched more coverage of this disaster I started to realize how on point this cartoon really is.

The violence, sickness, disregard, and humiliation that we have seen surrounding this Katrina event happens everyday in the urban and rural poor neighborhoods of this country. Just two days ago, one of the teens that we know through Shiloh recounted the killing of a ten year old girl named Naisha at her housing complex in the Bronx. This was the 5th, that's right 5th child to be hit by gunfire in this neighborhood in the last two weeks.

The housing, education, safety, and sanitation in some of these communities equal the horrors that we have seen in the Superdome and at the New Orleans convention center. There is an article in the Village Voice from a resident of New Orleans who articulates something pretty profound and illuminating to me:

"But the guilt doesn't just come from history. It comes from enjoying the spoils of history today, as every visitor and every resident inevitably does...As Faulkner put it, "The past is never dead. It’s not even past."

Because here's why I feel so bad right now. I've chased the Mardi Gras Indians when they're stepping out in their peacock jewels under the expressway, and I've shaken my ass at a thousand Rebirth Brass Band shows, and I've eaten a pile of red beans and buttermilk biscuits and yelled till I was hoarse for a Zulu coconut, and I've been fed all my life in the bosom of this culture made up of people who have been kept down by the weight of poverty and misery and the whole American trip. That's the wellspring for all of us in America, really, the dark roux. Race is the central dynamic of American history. Jazz and blues, it's unbearably trite but true, are the American art form-the jazz of New Orleans and the blues of the Mississippi Delta.

Now we who dance and drink and play together forgot to stand up when it counted. We were waiting for the big storm, and we knew our city was full of people who had no cars, who were living in the same old camelbacks and shotgun shacks for a hundred years in the poorest part of town, and we didn't send buses and we didn't send vans and we didn't stop our family SUVs on the way out of town to let in a single mother and her child.

I really want to blame someone for the grandmothers who died in their wheelchairs on the street. I want someone to be held accountable for the babies who were separated from their mothers who can't find them because there was no list kept. I think someone, or some entity should pay for telling people to seek safety at the Superdome and Convention Center, but not provide safety or food when the people actually showed up.

I have been furious at Bush, the Governor of LA, and the Mayor of New Orleans. I think history will show a federal government that was caught on it's heals despite our "war on terror" preparedness. And a local and state government that was inept at best and lassie-faire at worst to the coming crisis. One thing is for sure there will be plenty of blame to go around in the end and history will make sure it gets assign to the appropriate entities and people. I just can't get over the differences in local, state, and federal response to the FOUR hurricanes that hit Florida practically all at once last year, and this one.

But I can't escape the fact that what the hurricane blew out from under the rug was the clear, obvious, and stark differences in opportunities between those with resources and those without. The old, sick, poor, and young are left without an adequate safety net even when impeding danger can be seen and anticipated. If no adaquate safety net is provided in acute impending danger, then what kind of safety net is there for the everyday, slow burning dangers like poor education, violence, and pathetic health care. The infant mortality rate in Beijing, China is 4.6% compared with 11.5% in Washington, DC for goodness sake. And the reasons and fixes for that one issue become nothing more than a political football for pundits and ideologues to kick around.

Out of all this there is growing hope. Today in the NY Times there is an article about people who are using the opportunity of financial assistance, good housing, and new starts to plant their feet on more solid ground. It's a hope filled article and one that I pray ends up being closer the the norm rather than the exception. I hope that out of this will come a revolutionary way to get people back on their feet, planted on solid ground, and provide them with opportunities that will see them succeed beyond their wildest dreams. Perhaps that could be one of the good legacies of this hurricane. A whole new and effective way to help the poor, sick, and old. It will be interesting to see the government spare no expense in helping people, and what that can do for them.

We as citizens are at unique moment in our nations history. I pray that Bush will re-awaken more of his compassion instead of just his conservatism to make sure we not only address the acute needs of brothers and sisters, but also the long-term global issues that put them in the situations they were in to begin with. As David Brooks, in a NY-Times editorial puts it

"Katrina means that the political culture, already sour and bloody-minded in many quarters, will shift. There will be a reaction. There will be more impatience for something new. There is going to be some sort of big bang as people respond to the cumulative blows of bad events and try to fundamentally change the way things are.

Reaganite conservatism was the response to the pessimism and feebleness of the 1970's. Maybe this time there will be a progressive resurgence. Maybe we are entering an age of hardheaded law and order. (Rudy Giuliani, an unlikely G.O.P. nominee a few months ago, could now win in a walk.) Maybe there will be call for McCainist patriotism and nonpartisan independence. All we can be sure of is that the political culture is about to undergo some big change.

We're not really at a tipping point as much as a bursting point. People are mad as hell, unwilling to take it anymore."

I sure hope he is right.

*------Update-------*
This was in the Times this morning.

From Bob Herbert:

"New Orleans was not a disaster waiting to happen when the screaming winds of Katrina slammed the city with the force of an enemy attack. The disaster was already under way long before Katrina ever existed. The flood that followed the storm, and the Bush administration's ineptitude following the flood, were the blows that sent an already weakened city down for the count...The classroom environment has been chaotic. About 10,000 of the 60,000 students were suspended last year, and nearly 1,000 were expelled. Half of the high school kids fail to graduate in four years...The Philadelphia Inquirer, had just completed a paper for the Children's Defense Fund, which is concerned about the effect on children of the chronic violence plaguing New Orleans. Ms. Cass noted that as of Aug. 19, there had been 192 murders in the city, an increase of 7 percent over that period last year. (You can get a decent perspective on the violence if you note that New Orleans, with a population of 500,000, had 264 homicides last year, compared with the 572 homicides in New York, which has a population of 8 million.)"

From David Brooks:

"Hurricane Katrina has given us an amazing chance to do something serious about urban poverty. That's because Katrina was a natural disaster that interrupted a social disaster. It separated tens of thousands of poor people from the run-down, isolated neighborhoods in which they were trapped. It disrupted the patterns that have led one generation to follow another into poverty. It has created as close to a blank slate as we get in human affairs, and given us a chance to rebuild a city that wasn't working. We need to be realistic about how much we can actually change human behavior, but it would be a double tragedy if we didn't take advantage of these unique circumstances to do something that could serve as a spur to antipoverty programs nationwide. The first rule of the rebuilding effort should be: Nothing Like Before. Most of the ambitious and organized people abandoned the inner-city areas of New Orleans long ago, leaving neighborhoods where roughly three-quarters of the people were poor. If we just put up new buildings and allow the same people to move back into their old neighborhoods, then urban New Orleans will become just as rundown and dysfunctional as before."