Sri Lanka is a tiny place. Maybe that's given us a Napoleonic Complex, maybe we're tired of being compared to snot. Throw in the war, the tsunami, the suicide rates...we know we can't play with the big boys. Ain't no way we can show them up.
Until now:
President Chandrika Bandaranaike of Sri Lanka, in China on a state visit, sent messages of sympathy to Washington while her government contributed $25,000 through the American Red Cross.
So sure, it might not seem like much to our corporate-dough-raking readers. (coughmyannualsalarycough.) But that would be missing the point:
In a turnabout, the United States is now on the receiving end of help from around the world as some two dozen countries offer post-hurricane assistance. Venezuela, a target of frequent criticism by the Bush administration, offered humanitarian aid and fuel. [link]
But Condi, FEMA and the Prez seem to have differing views on accepting the aid:
With offers from the four corners of the globe pouring in, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has decided "no offer that can help alleviate the suffering of the people in the afflicted area will be refused," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Thursday.However, in Moscow, a Russian official said the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency had rejected a Russian offer to dispatch rescue teams and other aid.
Still, Bush told ABC-TV: "I'm not expecting much from foreign nations because we hadn't asked for it. I do expect a lot of sympathy and perhaps some will send cash dollars. But this country's going to rise up and take care of it.""You know," he said, "we would love help, but we're going to take care of our own business as well, and there's no doubt in my mind we'll succeed. And there's no doubt in my mind, as I sit here talking to you, that New Orleans is going to rise up again as a great city."
As the news reports and first-person accounts roll in, it looks increasingly, incredibly clear that we have not been taking care of our own business well. Not well at all.
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin (who crossed party lines to support Bobby Jindal for Governor) exploded with frustration in a local radio interview last Thursday:
I told him [the President] we had an incredible crisis here and that his flying over in Air Force One does not do it justice.[link]
Mayor Nagin's impassioned interview with Garland Robinette, (the WWL interviewer) continues:
You know the reason why the looters got out of control? Because we had most of our resources saving people, thousands of people that were stuck in attics, man, old ladies. When you pull off the doggone ventilator vent and you look down there and they're standing in there in water up to their freaking necks.
And they don't have a clue what's going on down here. They flew down here one time two days after the doggone event was over with TV cameras, AP reporters, all kind of goddamn -- excuse my French everybody in America, but I am pissed...
We're getting reports and calls that are breaking my heart, from people saying, "I've been in my attic. I can't take it anymore. The water is up to my neck. I don't think I can hold out." And that's happening as we speak.
You know what really upsets me, Garland? We told everybody the importance of the 17th Street Canal issue. We said, "Please, please take care of this. We don't care what you do. Figure it out."
ROBINETTE: Who'd you say that to?
NAGIN: Everybody: the governor, Homeland Security, FEMA. You name it, we said it.
And they allowed that pumping station next to Pumping Station 6 to go under water. Our sewage and water board people -- Marcia St. Martin (ph) -- stayed there and endangered their lives.
And what happened when that pumping station went down, the water started flowing again in the city and it starting getting to levels that probably killed more people. In addition to that, we had water flowing through the pipes in the city. That's a power station over there. So there's no water flowing anywhere on the east bank of Orleans Parish. So our critical water supply was destroyed because of lack of action.[link]
A friend forwarded this email from a friend of hers, a medical student at Tulane:
It is no coincidence that the levee first broke at the industrial canal - this is the poorest neighborhood - a low area that has frequent minor flooding from your average bad thunderstorms. Over the years, levee repair has been most active in more affluent neighborhoods where the community complains that the wall isn't high enough....Please understand that many New Orleans residents just couldn't leave. It is/was a very poor city. Many people don't have cars, there was no public bus involvement out of the city, and without available cash, what were people going to do once out of the city? Hotel rooms from Houston to Little Rock to Atlanta were booked. Most of those that stayed just didn't have the means to leave, and our city has never developed a plan to assist people to leave. We didn't even have established shelters. The superdome was always a plan B shelter, but there was no plan A. That is because the city wanted people to leave, and felt that just having shelters would be counterproductive. Last year, for hurricane Ivan, people took shelter in the superdome and had to contend with no food or water, heat, bad sanitation and chaos. Nothing like what we have now, but it served as a disincentive to come to the superdome this time...
6 years ago, the city evacuated for Hurricane Georges, and the interstate was a parking lot during the storm. Luckily, it diverted East at the last moment, but that experience also taught residents that staying might be safer than a late evacuation, since getting caught on the freeway could be deadly. In short, there are lots of reasons that people stayed in New Orleans, and it is naive to blame them for not heeding the mandatory evacuation order. By the way, that order was given 12 hours before the rain started, and we know from prior experience that New Orleans needs 48 hours to effectively evacuate.
Funny, then, that FEMA director Michael Brown decided to blame the victims:
I think the death toll may go into the thousands and, unfortunately, that's going to be attributable a lot to people who did not heed the advance warnings. [link]
Finger pointing is essentially counter-productive, yet there appears to be a clear case for systemic racism and neglect of the poor in a city that is 67% African-American. From what I've seen on the news, most residents' attempts to survive by scavenging are not being distinguished apart from the outright looting of some punks. All reports and images are conflated into some sort of Black Anarchy, as witnessed by the controversy surrounding an AP newswire that captioned a Black person as "looting" while a young White couple were "finding." Slate's Jack Shafer gives it a try, but I haven't seen much else.
Still, the world outside our borders has much to say about this tragedy:
World leaders and ordinary citizens have expressed sympathy with the people of the southern United States whose lives were devastated by the hurricane and the flooding that followed...The pictures of the catastrophe -- which has killed hundreds and possibly thousands -- have evoked memories of crises in the world's poorest nations such as last year's tsunami in Asia, which left more than 230,000 people dead or missing.
But some view the response to those disasters more favorably than the lawless aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. [ link]
My homeboy had this to say from the comfort of the Motherland:
I am absolutely disgusted. After the tsunami our people, even the ones who lost everything, wanted to help the others who were suffering," said Sajeewa Chinthaka, 36, as he watched a cricket match in Colombo, Sri Lanka."Not a single tourist caught in the tsunami was mugged. Now with all this happening in the U.S. we can easily see where the civilized part of the world's population is." [link]
So what gives? Economic disparity has a great deal to do with those who managed to leave New Orleans and those forced to remain. Why that disparity generally falls along color lines is question long debated, little understood. But the city's lack of preparation does have a reason.
It appears that the money has been moved in the presidents budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose thats the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees cant be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us.
-- Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; New Orleans Times-Picayune, June 8, 2004.
That was a year ago. So between diverted funds, denial of global warming, developers building on wetlands, delayed evacuation orders, no clear disaster-response program, contradictory directives from FEMA and Homeland Security, and the Governor Kathleen Blanco's shoot-to-kill order ( Great idea, Kathy!) we are now watching a terrible natural disaster assume horrifyingly tragic proportions. All while President Bush refuses aid from abroad.
I don't mean to discount the real looters and predators running amok right now. Free-wheeling New Orleans' Mayor Ray Nagin offers a reason that might explain why people felt safer in the aftermath of the Asian tsunami and Bombay flood than they do in New Orleans:
"And one of the things people -- nobody's talked about this. Drugs flowed in and out of New Orleans and the surrounding metropolitan area so freely it was scary to me, and that's why we were having the escalation in murders...You have drug addicts that are now walking around this city looking for a fix, and that's that reason why they were breaking in hospitals and drug stores. They're looking for something to take the edge off of their jones, if you will.And right now, they don't have anything to take the edge off. And they've probably found guns. So what you're seeing is drug- starving crazy addicts, drug addicts, that are wrecking havoc. And we don't have the manpower to adequately deal with it. We can only target certain sections of the city and form a perimeter around them and hope to God that we're not overrun." [link]
A quick attempt to get drug stats unearthed a 2003 National Institute on Drug Abuse study:
The number of MDMA ED [Ecstasy] mentions decreased in 11 CEWG areas from the first and/or second half of 2001 to the first half of 2002, with a significant increase reported only in New Orleans.
The report cites weed and ecstasy as the main drugs in New Orleans..not what I'd consider a crack-epidemic, but reliable numbers are hard to come by. In any case, it doesn't take a great many desperate users to create a general atmosphere of fear and lawlessness, so maybe the Mayor is on to something. These are just some thoughts, not a comprehensive analysis by any means.
Amardeep tackles the sociological implications surrounding Hurricane Katrina, as well as comparisons to third world countries in his blog.
