Centerfield: Katrina Anniversary

August 29, 2006

Katrina Anniversary

Below the fold is the text of my Katrina anniversary post over at Stubborn Facts (go over there to see some pictures I took after the storm at a shelter in Baton Rouge). In addition to this message, I'd like to take a personal moment to thank everybody at Centerfield for the support you gave me during and after Hurricane Katrina. Although I wasn't able to convince all of you to stop bickering about the politics while rescues were still going on, many of you did. A special thanks to Brian (whom I have lately and only temporarily been angry at), who was particularly supportive in that thread. Please remember that many, many thousands of people are still suffering from the effects of that disaster. Whatever the cause, whomever is to blame, the reality is that there are thousands of people who still need help and support. Please remember that in the political bickering.

Today is, of course, the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. I'd like to take this opportunity to remind people of the scope of this disaster. It emptied a major American city for months, destroying large swaths of it. It killed over 1,000 people and washed to sea just about everything south of I-10 in Mississippi and Alabama. Parts of Louisiana more than 100 miles north of New Orleans were without power for weeks, even as residents in those areas housed evacuated family members and their friends with no place else to go. Close to a million people were displaced from their homes for months, and many even longer than that.

Shortly after the storm, I found myself touring several shelters in the Baton Rouge area. I visited first hand with people who had fled their homes with little or nothing. The people rescued from rooftops by helicopter usually lacked even a shirt on their back when they arrived at the shelter. The picture just above shows the entire worldly possessions left to one small family

One woman's legs were swollen to huge size by the ordeal of trekking through chest-deep mucky water trying to get to the Superdome. Her husband would be dead now had it not been for samaritans who took the description of the pills he needed and broke into a shuttered pharmacy to get more for him.

Another woman was in tears, of joy, because her 14-year-old son had just been located in Houston. She hadn't seen or heard from him since the storm, and didn't know if he was alive or dead. My friend held the woman's 2-month-old in her arms as she frantically put everything she now owned into 4 little boxes and some plastic grocery bags before they took her to the airport to be flown to Houston to join the boy.

I saw a teenage boy, maybe 17 or 18, who was completely shell-shocked. He couldn't say a word to anybody, he just stared ahead with a blank expression on his face. The nuns tried to soothe him as best they could, as of course did his family, but he was too far gone at that point to be reached.

My visit to the shelter was not, in the end, depressing. The overwhelming majority of the people there were finding ways to cope, finding ways to live with each other in such desparate, cramped quarters. The little kids were being little kids, running around playing with each other... until, their parents said, night came and their nightmares began.

Despite the tragedy, I left with a feeling of hope. Life is the greatest of all God's blessings. As long as there is life, there is hope. No matter how bad the things which have happened to us are, much worse things have happened to others.

So my Katrina anniversary wish for all of you is to go and love life, your family, and your friends. However little you may have, be glad of it. And thank you for sharing some small part of your life here with us.

UPDATE: I almost forgot something very important. To all the people of this wonderful country, who have given so much of their time and money and hope and energy to the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, THANK YOU! You have been amazingly supportive and generous to us. You took us into your homes and communities, you sent us food and clothing, you gave us comfort and hope when we need it most. From the deepest bottom of our hearts, thank you.

Posted by PatHMV at August 29, 2006 05:53 PM

Comments

I sure hope people get the help they need to bounce back. It has been the type of extreme and tragic (and extended!) test we all hope our family and friends never have to face. New Orleans and its people will be forever different.

I watched coverage of various aspects of Katrina over the last few nights. It's encouraging to see how resilient people can be. In one segment, an NO resident who had lost everything and was living in a trailer city while just barely "getting over" was interviewed. I doubt I'll ever forget this guy for his simple matter-of-fact humanity. He understood that giving up just wasn't an option, seemed grateful for the help he'd gotten, and was going to keep putting one foot in front of the other. It's no surprise if the people who bounce back best develop a deep appreciation of the mantra "one day at a time."

I also hope that we as a nation are intelligent enough to learn some good lessons from this. I watched a modern marvels program on the engineering aspects of the levee failures. A very useful analogy I hear is was that of a brick on top of jello...no matter how strong the brick, what about the jello? Those levees were eventually going to fail when a big enough storm came, it was in some sense a disaster waiting to happen.

Let me hasten to add that I don't want us to leap from noticing that to insisting that we aught to therefore rebuild New Orleans in a drastically different manner, to accomodate way fewer people, back awy from the location, or build a fortress. I just think we should face the many competing facts both in nature and on the ground and the probabilities we can expect that the future holds.

In rebuilding the levees, time and cost considerations surely make the notion of rebuilding to protect from the most severe storms at least debatable. I don't see any no-brainers here. Cadillac levees would take far longer at much higher cost, and leave the city more vulnerable in the interim. And we might find that the jello problem defeats us again despite our best efforts, or even that the expensive cadillac rusts before we need to drive it.

I just hope we do the best we can to restore as much as possible that was of such unique value to our nation, namely the people and the culture...the savor of New Orleans. And that we also do the best we can to use hindsight to rebuild with foresight, and eliminate whatever gross oversights and errors in judgement led to the biggest tragedies.

I consider myself a patriot with a deep love of country, and as a blues player and lover and also a bit of an epicurean, New Orleans has always been on the short list of places I've really wanted to experience in person. So in my VERY small way, I mourn the loss while hoping that New Orleans rises again. I'm still looking forward to the day when my wife and I do visit, which we will. I hope the natives will tell me tales of New Orleans past and hopes for the future, And when they tell us how "it's not what it was" I hope they'll let me cry with them. In the meantime, I hope our prayers help them stay strong.

Posted by: bk at August 30, 2006 10:27 AM

Thanks Brian. We get a lot of bad press lately, and I'm glad some of our good side is coming through. New Orleans is a very different place, and always was, from the rest of Louisiana. It'll be back some way, some how. We've survived an utter lack of political leadership (at all levels) before, and we'll survive it this time, too.

Posted by: PatHMV at August 30, 2006 12:06 PM

Centerfield

A Weblog of Centrist Voices in American Politics

August 29, 2006

Katrina Anniversary