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OK, clear yourself an hour, prepare to shed a few tears and have your heart lifted by the pure resilience of the human spirit. Point your browser to This American Life and click on the RA (RealAudio) icon next to last weekend’s story, “After the Flood”. This is what radio, bold and unfettered, can do. And what our print and video media, so far, have not done. Listen, and let me know what you hear.
(Disclaimer: My son is one of the producers of the show.)
If they succeed in driving New Orleans out of our collective memory—you know who “they” are, and we all know how we forget—that will be a great loss and sorrow. We must not forget.
The subject has virtually disappeared from the blogs, all of them: liberal, conservative, and in between. If it does show up, it does so with its political wrapping—what does the failure of the feds mean for Bush & Co? Will NOLA help the Dems or the GOP?
Fortunately, there are a few who have not yet forgotten and who are doing their best to keep the memory alive for all of us. Boing Boing has been spectacular, with post after post keeping us alert to what’s going on in the devastated city. A post today, from a cameraman in the city, is brilliant and chilling; and if it is accusatory, the accusations are based on what the accuser sees, there and now, and on what he does not see:
There are dead bodies on the street. Yesterday, I watched as a man tried to flag down a cop. There was a middle aged woman who had been dead for days, and yet no authority seems concerned. We can see that there was no plan for the living, but you would think that there would be some respect for the dead. When he was finally able to get a cop to stop - not an easy thing to do since they drive through at such high speed…. the cop said that they didn’t care about removing bodies. Someone’s mother, or child, she was still there late last night as I drove out.
I have driven from one end of New Orleans to the other - a drive of over 7 miles, and repeatedly not seen one cop, guardsman, trooper…. And where is the Red Cross? Not ONE. Everyone on the street says, “Where’s the Red Cross? I gave them so much money after 9/11 and the tsunami - where’s the Red Cross�. The cops I’ve asked say they are not here because they are afraid. The Red Cross says that the authorities are not letting them in the city. I find that hard to believe. The police can’t even secure a few blocks, let alone keep the Red Cross out. Helping victims in New Orleans is exactly why the Red Cross was created.
Eric Berger, the SciGuy, has also kept his focus. Today’s post reprints a long essay from Dr. Leigh Bishop, a psychiatrist at the Michael DeBakey VA Medical Center, detailing the experience he had caring for the evacuees who arrived from Louisiana:
I walked toward him. He paced back and forth like an agitated bear until I caught his eye and was able to introduce myself. With barely an acknowledgement, he began talking rapidly. He was a critical care specialist, on duty since before the storm rolled in. “You can’t imagine what it’s like back there.” I was to hear that several times in the next two days. “Try to imagine carrying a patient on a heart-lung machine down a darkened stairwell. We were running out of medications, running out of fluids. There was shooting outside. We did this for four days. And the airport is unbelievable-total chaos. Ambulances dropping people off like packages and immediately leaving to pick up someone else. They are putting patients who aren’t expected to make it off to one side, black-tagging them so that they can deal with the ones who can still be saved. I’m too tired to move, but I don’t know if I’ll even be able to sleep tonight. What I want right now is a shower and some alcohol.” His speech began to lose some of its pressure as he talked.
I asked how much sleep he had had, and how recently. “I don’t know. Maybe this afternoon for about twenty minutes. I can’t remember.” He paused, eyes glazed a moment. “There were bodies in the water everywhere. Someone said that you could see sharks in Metairie from the air.”
We can’t be distracted, even for something as important as the Roberts confirmation; we have to remember that half of a major city is still under water, that most of the loss was experienced by those who had the least, that there are hundreds of thousands still homeless, tens of thousands still missing, and God knows how many bodies lying out for the kites and rats and alligators to feed upon. And that another set of vultures, in the shape of Halliburton, Blackwater, and the quaintly named Service Corporation International, are already hopping around the outskirts, tearing at the bags of money that Congress is flinging their way and flapping off with talons filled with loot to feed their hungry shareholders.
Sheila Lennon, over at Subterranean Homepage News, tells a moving story of a call she received from her old friend Bob. Bob has a chronic illness and, at age 60, he had been living in a Nursing Home in Harvey, LA, just across the river from New Orleans. When the nursing home was evacuated, Bob stayed behind because he was able to get around and felt that he would be OK. When his generator ran out of fuel, he walked a couple of miles to a pickup shelter.
When the buses arrived Saturday to evacuate them all and the throng pressed forward, Bob hung back. “I said to myself,” he told me, “If Buddha can be the last one to achieve nirvana, I can be the last one on the bus.” He ended up getting one of three seats in a helicopter to New Orleans International Airport, and eventually found himself on a plane to Texas.
In mid-flight, the passengers were told they were going to Corpus Christi.
“When we arrived at the shelter, people applauded and welcomed us like heroes,” he said. “They’re treating us like we were gold: Three hot meals — not sandwiches, home-cooked meals. The amount of clothing people have donated is incredible. Social-security tables were set up today, and the food-stamp people are coming tomorrow.”
But he doesn’t know what’s next.
Sheila points out a truth that everyone knows but no one is talking about much. The disaster relief laws are written for homeowners and small businesses. “Lawmakers hadn’t written the laws for disasters so total that people can’t go back, have no where to go back to, and own little but what they could carry away on foot.”
With Congress back in session, there’s a chance to change that. Bill Clinton knows the truth; he’s the one Sheila heard it from. Do the other Dems know? Do they care? And if they don’t, who will?
Agape, pronounced ah-gah-pay´, is from the Greek; it means, according to dictionary.com, “Love as revealed in Jesus, seen as spiritual and selfless and a model for humanity.” Pronounced
a-gayp´, it means, according to the same source, “In a state of wonder or amazement, as with the mouth wide open.”
It is in that latter sense that one is forced to read the latest from Agape Press, labeling itself “Reliable News from a Christian Source”. The post, titled “New Orleans Residents: God’s Mercy Evident in Katrina’s Wake”, quotes two ministers from New Orleans. The first, Chuck Kelley, President of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, considers it evidence of God’s mercy that He did not hit New Orleans head on with Katrina. “Had the levee given way during the hurricane, he says, ‘untold thousands of people’ would have been killed.”
OK. But the prize goes to the Reverend Bill Shanks, pastor of New Covenant Fellowship of New Orleans, who sees the evidence of God’s mercy in the fact that He has, via the convenient mechanism of Katrina, wiped out much of the “rampant sin common to the city”. He warned us and warned us, complains the Rev. Shanks, but did we listen? Noooo. And now this.
“New Orleans now is abortion free. New Orleans now is Mardi Gras free. New Orleans now is free of Southern Decadence and the sodomites, the witchcraft workers, false religion — it’s free of all of those things now,” Shanks says. “God simply, I believe, in His mercy purged all of that stuff out of there — and now we’re going to start over again.”
Agape. From the Greek
(Or is that hubris?)
The American Red Cross is safe, I think. They’ve certainly screwed up in the past, but they’re under a lot of public scrutiny now, and I suspect that they’ll make the most productive use of anything you give.
I gave $50 to America’s Second Harvest; that will go directly to Katrina’s victims, and it will go in the form of what they need most right now: food, clean water, medical supplies.
The Progressive Blog Alliance is coordinating an effort by liberal bloggers to gather contributions from their readers. That’s their ad in the right sidebar.
And Strengthen the Good has mounted a matching campaign that will match your contributions (made through their site) to the Red Cross Disaster Fund. I’ve kicked in $100 to the matching fund, which is up to $1,650 now and growing.
If none of these work for you, Instapundit has the most comprehensive list of helping organizations I’ve seen so far.
Just give.
At Talking Point Memo, Josh Marshall does a number on the “deconstruction, privatization and crony-fication of FEMA.” He points to an article by Joe Elliston in the Independent that gives a moving picture of men and women struggling valiantly to do important work while the crew of thugs they work for fails, at every juncture, to give them the support that they need.
Among emergency specialists, “mitigation”–the measures taken in advance to minimize the damage caused by natural disasters–is a crucial part of the strategy to save lives and cut recovery costs. But since 2001, key federal disaster mitigation programs, developed over many years, have been slashed and tossed aside. FEMA’s Project Impact, a model mitigation program created by the Clinton administration, has been canceled outright. Federal funding of post-disaster mitigation efforts designed to protect people and property from the next disaster has been cut in half, and now, communities across the country must compete for pre-disaster mitigation dollars.
Update: 3:02:05 PM good story on the gutting of FEMA at Salon.
Update: Thursday 5:54:05 PM This is unbelievable! The FEMA website, in their list of organizations to which Katrina donations can be made, has Pat Robertson’s personal charity Operation Blessing in the number 2 spot, between The Red Cross and America’s Second Harvest.
Update: Friday 9:38:31 AM The Washington Monthly has a timeline of events regarding FEMA and NOLA flood-control projects under the Bush administration; I can’t do better than the Monthly’s lead-in: “Read ‘em and weep.”
Gasoline is expected to hit $4/gallon sometimes soon. (Who will monitor the global oil industry’s profits pre- and post-Katrina?) That’s bearable, for us. We have some measure of control over the amount we drive; we don’t drive far; our cars are relatively thrifty; and we’re rich, by current standards. For some, in the virtual absence, in most parts of the country, of effective public transportation, $4/gallon will be enough to push them over the edge, further skewing those current standards. And I suspect that gas prices will never go down, and may, in fact, peak at much more than $4.
But the discomfort created by high gasoline prices pales compared to the damage to the national and global economies that will be the inevitable result of the loss, for months at least, of the Port of Southern Louisiana. Charles Stross gives an overview of what’s at stake. The Port, which stretches for 50 miles north and south of New Orleans, is the largest port in the United States, and the fifth largest in the world.
Stross quotes a report from StratFor:
“It is the key port for the export of grains to the rest of the world — corn, soybeans, wheat and animal feed. Midwestern farmers and global consumers depend on those exports. The United States imports crude oil, petrochemicals, steel, fertilizers and ores through the port. Fifteen percent of all U.S. exports by value go through the port. Nearly half of the exports go to Europe.”
Stross estimates that the economic cost of closing the Port of Souther Louisiana for up to three months may equal 5% of the US balance of trade with the rest of the world; the cost, he says, is likely to be an order of magnitude higher than the $25-35 Billion in probable insurance claims, and may be more than the cost of the Iraq war to date. He asks, “What are the likely consequences (locally and globally) of blowing a 5% of GDP sized hole under the waterline of the US economy?”
Iraq has been draining the resources of the country, pushing people deeper into poverty, ripping gaping holes in what’s left of a public safety net, and putting many areas that have relied on federal programs to survive in jeopardy (including New Orleans; one probable reason for the break in the levees was the huge cuts suffered over the past several years by the engineering efforts structured to maintain the levee system.) Now double that drain.
The levees have been breached. It’s hard to see how we will be able to keep our heads above water.
This is way worse than 9-11. It seems likely that New Orleans is history, at least as a major city; it may remain as a name on a map, but no one will live there who has the resources to move somewhere else. Venice can survive; Amsterdam can survive. But no coastal city below sea level can survive in the hurricane corridor. Not in our present era of global warming climate change. (What new euphemism will they come up with to deny what’s happening, now that Katrina has revealed the truth behind that one?)
Here are some links that I’ve found useful:
Boing Boing has a fascinating story about how our perceptions are shaped by the media. Two pictures, each of a person wading waist-deep in the flood waters, dragging a large plastic bag or box behind.
The images were shot by different photographers, and captioned by different photo wire services. The Associated Press caption accompanying the image with a black person says he’s just finished “looting” a grocery store. The AFP/Getty Images caption describes lighter skinned people “finding” bread and soda from a grocery store. No stores are open to sell these goods.
Sad.
Halley Suitt links the looting to this story on Yahoo News.
Sheila Lennon’s Subterranean Homepage News is maintaining good coverage of the disaster from a media perspective.
The Times-Picayune has been positively heroic. It’s only available online now, with staff working out of the LSU Journalism building.
Eric Berger’s SciGuy Science Blog has been an incredibly up-to-date source of accurate news about what, exactly, is happening since several days before the hurricane landed.
Doc Searls takes the broadcast media to task for their overwhelmingly dumb response to the tragedy:
This is the time for the mainstream media to ask good questions, and to provide those near and outside the areas with truly useful information.
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We’re getting remarkably little of it from the people doing the interviews, the national reporters standing in front of the rubble. Larry King, who all but wrote the book on dumb softball questions, asks “old friend” Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour how many people died and how long it will take to rebuild. CNN’s often interesting Anderson Cooper delivers an obvious comparison to the recent Tsunami’s wreck of Sri Lanka. Like the pictures alone failed to make the same point. A couple days ago we watched Anderson stand in the wind and rain talking about the wind and rain.
And he lists four things we want to see on our sets:
Maps of what’s wrecked and what’s not. Specifics on roads, bridges, railroads. Truly detailed maps and static graphics are helpful. (CNN should be able to do better than this.) And spare us the crap like “The CNN.com video experience is optimized for Windows Media Player 9 or above.” If you have to show video, put it in a format anybody can watch.
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The status of cities, counties, towns, parishes, schools, hospitals, military bases, government offices and other institutions. This is helpful to people looking to reach any of those places, or who wonder how people they know might be doing there.
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Reports on where to turn on the Web for more complete information than TV can contribute. Lists of local and regional radio stations that are operative and providing useful information.
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Relevant advertising. Now is the time to sell ads to public spirited advertisers who have useful and unsensational things to say to viewers.
The New York Times (free registration required) has finally, this morning, caught up with the disaster, in an issue that’s full of excellent reporting. Thy’ve also addressed the first of Doc’s points with an excellent map of the city, showing how the floodwaters are affecting different parts of it.
CNN has been the only mainstream news organization that’s stayed consistently on top of the story in their web coverage. Well-written stories, useful links. And I expect that if you’re able to view the video clips (I’m not, for some reason that I don’t currently have the time or inclination to debug), I suspect that it’s even better.
The only area in which I can see CNN falling down is in their Advertising Links. The screenshot to the right was taken this morning, just an hour or so ago. (As I am writing this, I checked their site again, and it seems that the advertising links are now a bit more appropriate.)
Finally, here is another picture, also taken today (August 31st, 2005, for you history buffs). Thanks to the Daily Kos.
Eric Berger’s SciGuy science blog has the best ongoing coverage of Katrina, which is shaping up to be a disaster of unprecedented proportions. Although the latest news gives a little hope that it won’t be as bad as it looked like it might be earlier today. From Eric’s latest post:
Forecasters at the National Hurricane Center plot out the official track for a storm by reviewing several models. As they follow a storm, the forecasters will tend to rely on some models more than others as they seem to handle that particular storm better.
Here’s a link to an image of some of the computer models the hurricane center uses for a forecast. Although the lines may look scattered, from past experience, I can say they’re actually pretty well clustered for Katrina.
The interesting thing to me is that a fair number of the models actually have the storm aimed toward Mississippi a bit. If this happens New Orleans could be spared the very worst.
Latest reports are that the three-lane highways north out of New Orleans are at a standstill, and that there are no hotel rooms between Biloxi and Mobile. If I were a praying man, my prayers would be with you.
Update 5:20 PM EDT:
WikiNews has a page up which seems likely to be receiving pretty timely updates.
And while you’re there, support the WikiMedia Foundation.