When Government Shrugs: Lessons of Katrina

A year has passed since Hurricane Katrina turned New Orleans into the closest thing this country has seen to Pompeii. Although FEMA trailers dot more of the landscape than they did a few months ago, as homeowners have begun to dribble back, at least 60 percent of the city seems unoccupied. It will never be the same. Most of the markers of familiar life, the daily round, swept away, never to return. The beautiful Louis Armstrong song "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?" used to give me a little rush of wistful, sweet nostalgia. Now it makes me sob.

Most of my family lives in New Orleans. Nearly all of them were or remain displaced. My mother's Holly-grove neighborhood sat in four feet of water for nearly a month after the 17th Street Canal ruptured. She left home the day before the storm hit and couldn't move back until New Year's Day. Some family members were more fortunate, some less. Most of them lived in the Gentilly area, which was largely devastated by the breach of the London Avenue Canal. My aunt and uncle's house, only a few blocks from the breach, was inundated, as was that of a cousin who lived near them. She had to be rescued from a rooftop. Even some relatives whose houses weren't flooded remain displaced, as children had no schools and most of the city went without electricity and other services.

My boat-lifted cousin Ann works for the municipal Parks and Recreation Department. She needed to stay in the city to be available to respond in the storm's wake. She was preparing to leave for work the bright, clear morning after the storm, anticipating what conditions would be like around town but feeling relieved that the city had dodged the worst. Then she saw water running down the street and couldn't figure out where it was coming from. Within an hour, it covered the fire hydrant at the curb. Two hours later, she had retreated to a neighbor's attic, where they were trapped overnight.

I thought of her whenever I heard someone exclaim self-righteously, "I don't understand why they didn't leave." One day, I finally snapped.

I was in a Cincinnati airport restaurant when I overheard two women responding to television coverage on the night that Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard broke down in tears over the death of his emergency services director's mother. She drowned in a St. Bernard Parish nursing home as a result of the storm. They seemed like Midwestern church ladies, though it turned out they were flying to Atlantic City, but I guess that is a place of worship. They went immediately from the "Isn't it so sad what's happening to those people?" to the "I just don't know why they didn't evacuate." I turned to them and said, "That's right; you don't know because you can't imagine being in their situation" and walked out without ordering anything.

Always ready to exoticize, even when on their best behavior, the news media pulled out their one-size-fits-all cultural exceptionalism. People down there are rooted in their ways, we were told. They have a primordial commitment to place that anchors them to an extent the rest of us can't understand.

Of course, the media found cases to flavor this story--for instance, an elderly woman who refused to leave her cats. (Anyone remember the curmudgeonly old coot, a Gabby Hayes character-come-to-life, who wouldn't evacuate his place on Mount Saint Helens?) The exoticizing narrative not only dresses up sentimentalized voyeurism as empathetic understanding. It also recasts victims as eccentrics who, by definition, are outside normal life and who, therefore, we don't really need to care about. They prefer to live that way.

From that twisted perspective it appears almost disrespectful to consider them to be suffering; they march to the beat of a different drummer and make different choices from the rest of us. The implication is that they accept the consequences of those choices and that it would be condescending to believe otherwise. This is, of course, only a free-market, happy-face expression of victim-blaming.