Human Rights Law

Because It Is Bitter;

By Alexa

I don't know about y'all, but the images and voices from Hurricane Katrina haunt me. Although I was "lucky" in having moved from my hometown, New Orleans, four years before Katrina, it's still impossible to come to terms with the anger (well  . . . maybe rage would be more accurate) and shame that have seared my soul.

It's hard to fathom that this is America, even though more than two years have passed. Aren't we the most generous nation in the world? I remember the Indian Ocean tsunami. I remember September 11. But I remember this:

Help in the form of contributions poured in from around the world. What wasn't tied up in bureaucratic red tape was outright turned away. Failure to properly distribute donations, that's not much of a surprise. Failure of compassion and humanity? That's the real thorn in my side.
We were in the attic. Water was half a foot, then four feet, and you know it wasn't rain water. Took an ax to punch a hole in the roof. I looked back and thought I saw something moving near the sofa, by tante's bookshelves. Sure enough. Was water moccasins, missy, all coiled up and hissing. Girl, I ran up the stairs like the devil himself was after me.

You wouldn't know it, but these are American citizens.

You might not believe a craven, ass-kissing coward named Ray Nagin holed up at the Hyatt Regency after his last minute "mandatory" evacuation was too little, too late. While Ray was hiding, he sent his most vulnerable citizens here.

When the roof collapsed at the Superdome, we didn't know, and didn't much care what caused it. People panicked. Everything that could go wrong went wrong at the 'Dome. You know they can make 7,000 people comfortable for 4 hours. They weren't in any way ready to have 40,000 (or was it really 75,000?) with no water, no food, no electricity. People died there. I don't know how many. Doctors write "heart problem" or "breathing problem" as the cause of the death so you don't know if the old lady you saw having seizures on the filthy floor because she needed insulin was counted officially. Don't know if the little baby with his lips cracked from thirst, trying hard to get a deep breath, eyes big as saucers before they closed for good; was he counted? Never forget the smell of the Superdome. Ray Nagin never put a foot near the place.

Where was FEMA? Don't ask. American Red Cross? Don't get me started. Where was that self-described compassionate conservative, President George W. Bush?

On vacation? Look, I don't care what he was doing. This is America. You've got American citizens being shot at by the National Guard. You've got one God-awful gusher of a flood with Lake Pontchartrain recycling the floodwaters at 26 gallons a minute through downtown New Orleans and girl, you tell me he was eating cake with John McCain? What is FEMA: Fuck Everyone with Melanin in America?

"I understand people having wanting things to have happened yesterday. I understand the anxiety of the people on the ground. So there is frustration. But I want people to know there is a lot of help coming." George W. Bush on Good Morning America, Thursday, September 1.----
(Three days after the levees broke. Muchacho, please. No one could have anticipated that.)

Oscar Zavala was a patient in a New Orleans hospital on Thursday, suffering from a bacterial infection. "What hurts in my soul," he said later, "is that we waited for the government response and it never came. My government is the first one there when anything happens in a foreign country . . . and here they failed from the very beginning." (Interview with Brian Williams, January 10, 2006.)

By that time, four days after Katrina came and went, the most devastating rumor of all, the one that caused the most distress among all the displaced people at the Superdome, was that the buses were coming. Just around the bend. They were always an hour away, day after day. The lies were widespread. FEMA had sent a fleet down from Vicksburg; the U.S. Army had them rolling down I-20 from Fort Knox; they were already at Jackson Barracks and would arrive momentarily.

Where would they go? To almost every state in the union.

George Bush didn't cause Hurricane Katrina; however, in his apathy, his inattention, his blank doll's eyes gaze, his years-long fight to assign blame and evade reconstruction and/or rebuilding, he created something else.

That, I submit to you, is diaspora, the longing to be home, and realizing deep down in your soul that home is memory.

Full post as published by Never In Our Names on August 29, 2008 (boomark / email).