It's been five years now since Hurricane Katrina made landfall. Actually, the second landfall is the one everyone remembers. It had crossed the southern part of Florida a few days earlier, causing some damage and a few deaths.
In thinking back five years ago, I realize I am still in shock. Such an epic event, such an epic failure of our government still leaves me largely at a loss for words, much as it did then. I didn't even write anything about it until September (true, the blog was a lot more sporadic back then).
Of course, I think America was in shock, too, and in a number of ways we still are. How does this happen? How do we let it happen? It's not clear those questions were ever answered, or ever will be.
None of what happened five years ago is about me, but analyzing the way I feel about it and the way it makes me think now is the only thing I really have. I'd love to be able to say that I left my job in D.C. and drove down to New Orleans to help -- and I almost did. But I didn't, and to this day I regret it. So evaluating it even now feels a little bit wrong, like I'm having an argument I don't deserve. But it is irresistible, and too large not to acknowledge, anyway.
The level at which the government failed the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast was and remains so large, it simply cannot escape comment. George W. Bush and his cabal of incompetents have been out of office for a couple of years, now. We can blame them -- and they do deserve much of the blame for the roughly 1,800 deaths needlessly caused by this disaster, not to mention the billions in damage -- but what good does it do us? At this point, it's just more political noise.
I grew up (professionally, that is) in the Federal government. I believe in our government and I believe we can do some things well. In fact we do some things very well. For all of the political noise surrounding government, it is a massive bureaucracy that actually moves with remarkable calibration.
I think what we've all come to realize is that Katrina represents something larger than the government's failure. It represented a real, tangible moment in America's long-running class war. It starkly defined the difference between disconnected, rich white guys ("...and Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job.") and poor black people. It was kind of like an extended "fuck you" to not just the poor and lower-middle class and working class who drowned and sat on rooftops in the lower Ninth Ward, but to poor people across America. I remember the common refrain from 2005: This would never happen in Connecticut.
And it's true. It wouldn't have. But what did anybody do about it? What could anybody do about it?
We're undergoing a tremendous debate in this country. The debate is two-fold. It's about the role of government in our lives, and it's about rich versus poor. On the second part, the rich are clearly winning. I gave Obama some credit earlier on the Deepwater Horizon response. Somehow on the economy and the banking bailouts, he's managing to fail in both the appearance of helping everyday working Americans who are struggling, and in actually doing so. If you need any proof just look at the jobless numbers as all signs point to a double-dip recession, and then take a look at bank profits this last quarter.
With respect to the role of government in our lives, I think we all know the answer already. In a different era, after a Hurricane Katrina-level disaster, a president -- Republican or Democrat, it wouldn't matter -- would have called for a massive public works project to put New Orleans back together again, bigger and better. Maybe they would have seen the opportunity to construct America's first real "green city." Maybe they would have set an ambitious goal: "Build New Orleans in Two Years." Something as audacious as hope. Something as grand as New Orleans herself.
Instead, we -- that is, the government -- kind of forgot about it. I heard something to the effect that New Orleans was around 25% rebuilt, although it is the second-fastest growing city in America. It's a start, five years out, but don't be fooled that much of that has to do with the government. The people are doing it themselves. Doesn't anyone feel any shame that Brad Pitt is more effective than the entire force of the federal government, or even the State of Louisiana, the City of New Orleans?
The name "Katrina" has come to be synonymous with "disaster," and we've undergone a few since the hurricane devastated the Gulf Coast. The Katrina war of Iraq. Anyone remember why we went, only this month pulling out the last combat brigade? The Katrina oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. We left BP in charge of that one. Someone somewhere said, "you wouldn't put the murderer in charge of the crime scene," and that's true. Another chance for a targeted project for volunteers like AmeriCorps, or even a new version of the Civilian Conservation Corp. Of course, there's been the Katrina economy. The worst economic disaster since the Great Depression, and the only ones who seemed to get an immediate rescue where the ones who caused it. They're as rich as ever, and loving it. And to carry the analogy further, we haven't rebuilt the economic levies to prevent another crisis in the future.
Five years later, and the actual Hurricane Katrina is still a stark reminder that even the notion of opportunity for all in this country has been co-opted by the rich at the expense of the poor. We still fight our political battles -- and I still think they're worth fighting -- but they are largely at the fringes, now. Democrats, working too hard to look magnanimous and "bi-partisan", have too often abandoned the poor and working-class of this country, while Republicans seem to have no compunction about abandoning the principles of governance for corporate stoogery (Citizens United, anyone?).
It's pretty much a recipe for another Katrina, hurricane or otherwise. It breaks my heart to say that the federal government, simply incapable of responding to a disaster, or even preparing for one, hasn't learned their lesson. I wonder if the rest of us have.
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