Hurricane Katrina - A Continuous Tragedy

Hurricane Katrina was a horrible tragedy, but worse was the way the government handled it. They stalled relief efforts for 4-5 days, which resulted in the eradication of a large majority of poverty-stricken African Americans. The image of floating corpses painted a gruesome picture for news-watchers around the world and the memory alone is enough to make me sick to this day. The case has been made over and over again that the delay of evacuation and urgently-needed food and supplies was a convenient way for the government to displace “undesirable” citizens, such as the homeless, poor, and African American. It is not for me to say whether certain people made conscious decisions to deny or stall aid to a certain demographic; not in a macroscopic sense. However, there is evidence that on local levels, prejudice prevailed.

Imagine losing friends, family, your home and all your possessions. Now imagine with no place to go, you are told the only safe haven in the city is a huge dome already filled to capacity with the rest of the city where violence abounds. Personally, I would get out of Dodge. Unfortunately that wasn't an option for the some 800 mostly black citizens trying to get out of town via a bridge over the Mississippi River, according to Andrew Buncombe. His article describes how the Gretna chief of police, Arthur Lawson admittedly ordered his men to blockade the bridge leading towards their predominantly white town of 18,000 people. As a measure to keep the crowd back, shots were fired over the desperate people's heads. Apparently officers on the scene told two paramedics, who were there helping with the relief effort, that they didn't want their town “to be another New Orleans”. Larry Bradshaw, one of the paramedics, got the impression by their cruel manner that their reasoning was based in racism. In retaliation to these charges, Chief Lawson reasoned that there was no food, water, or shelter in his town and furthermore he did not want Gretna to be “burned and pillaged”. In actuality, 75% of Gretna citizens had electricity and running water (Buncombe). Gretna should have put out the welcome mat and shared their resources with the people who really needed it regardless of color or social status, instead they resorted to needlessly scaring already-terrified people. It's true that whether or not the barricade was a direct result of racism is debatable, nevertheless no one can refute that the actions taken were cruel.

Cruelty, in the aftermath of Katrina, did not stop with African Americans. As reported by a UK news site, the relief effort was also full of bias based on nationality. Several British families claimed that US authorities would not evacuate them. Apparently when police went to hotels to evacuate people, the Britons were left behind with only promises(if they were lucky) from the police that they would come back for them. As it turns out, they didn't. One of the British families that wasn't so lucky was the Scotts, consisting of Gerard, his wife, and his seven year old son. Gerard claimed that “those that didn't fit their criteria were told to help themselves. The police said they were evacuating Americans, and took away the majority”. This is the epitome of nationalism. The family was left to fend for themselves for 6 days, finding what scraps they could in the kitchen, but mostly hiding out in a tiny windowless room, unable to leave the hotel. The trauma that this and many other families went through was undeserved and unnecessary. Be a patriot; love your country; but when you are a nationalist, you just end up making our whole nation look bad.

It has been five, almost six, years since the tragedy that was Katrina, plenty of time for rebuilding at least a good majority of New Orleans, right? Evidently not, claims Kimberly Allers, who visited New Orleans for her first time last August. On her visit, she learned that the lower ninth ward, which consists of mainly under-privileged African Americans, has received no money even though FEMA had allocated $90 million for rebuilding New Orleans. Consequently this district is left with one school already at maximum capacity of 750 students, with at least 450 more on a wait list. Hopefully none of these students get seriously injured as there is not a hospital nearby. All this information prompted Allers to take a look for herself (and me to look up pictures). Her descriptions (and the pictures) do not give me a lot of hope for the residents of this district that were displaced by catastrophe.

"Concrete steps that once led to a house, now lead to a field of overgrown grass and weeds. Over and over again. I saw where do-gooders like Brad Pitt and other organizations have helped rebuild new and colorful housing, that quite frankly, just looks weird sitting next to devastation” (Allers).

The lack of any relief funding going to this particularly poor district definitely adds credit to the theory that our government has no desire to help the now-homeless people based on their income or race. Hopefully, under new guidance, our country will be able to handle the next major catastrophe that comes our way and act with compassion and generosity rather than with cruelty and greed.