Americans are responding now to one of the worst natural disasters in our history. Checks are being written, supplies are being assembled, prayers are being said, blogs are providing information and hope. And finally, the federal government seems to be getting involved.
The task left undone as yet is trying to cope with this new reality-- psychologically, spiritually, emotionally. On Thursday New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin spoke on WLL radio, 12 minutes of raw human grief. At the end he concluded, "New Orleans will never be the same." After a long, horrible pause, he added, "In this time." Both he and the interviewer broke down in tears at that point.
We all need to make sense of the world. We need to know in our hearts that this place we inhabit isn't some endless series of random events where our actions do not matter in the grander scheme of things. After a huge hurricane where nature has sent a message which suggests we're all just dust motes whirling in a sunbeam, we need to create a new big picture. Otherwise, society will have a hard time going on.
Americans feast on patterns of myths-- complexes of stories told over and over again-- which usually allow us to see our nation as a psychological, spiritual, and emotional whole. The fundamental composite is this:
- we are a nation holding our own against common foes. We must always guard against those who would destroy us from outside, and those who would use government and power to control us from above.
- Our strength is in our ability to work hard and pull ourselves up by the bootstraps. Anyone can succeed if he or she tries hard enough.
- Of course, now and then events conspire to overwhelm our individual efforts, and at this time the benevolent community comes together to help those in need. Our generosity can be astonishing. It just takes a crisis to bring it all out.
Hurricane Katrina has wiped out that composite as effectively as it wiped beachfront homes from Bay St.Louis, Mississippi. This time, the entire composite failed.
The enemy: a hurricane makes a pretty poor enemy. It can't be evil. It can't be beaten back (although Pat Robertson once claimed to have prayed a hurricane away from Virginia Beach, Virginia). It is capricious, unpredictable, and inevitable. It can only be prepared for. And here is where America failed. Though we had days and days to see that this hurricane would cause terrible devastation in New Orleans, thousands of people who had no ability to move out of the city were left behind in the path of the enemy's destruction. We did not fight the enemy the way we could have.
The bootstrap principle: In a looming disaster, the tough get going. All the American people with the power to bootstrap their way out of New Orleans did so. The problem is, this idea that if you work hard enough, you can control your destiny, does not work for everyone. Poverty is not the result of laziness. It is a social condition, ingrained in our nation, almost impossible to eradicate. In a capitalist society, where wealth is unequally divided, there will be poor people. And no amount of Horatio Alger stories can change that.
Nearly all of those who stayed in New Orleans did not stay by choice. They stayed because they lacked the means to leave.
Generosity in a crisis: the breakdown of this party of the story hurts the most. Americans pride themselves more deeply than can be expressed on their ability to help. Natural disasters give us the opportunity to spring into action, and the media the opportunity to praise that action. After Hurricane Fran in 1996, a local newspaper devoted a week to a self-congratulatory section on the life of one hard-hit neighborhood which pulled together like family, shared their resources, and had nightly grill-outs of their soon-to-spoil freezer meat.
This time there was no freezer meat. No chain saws. No gas grills. No SUV's to navigate over and through fallen trees. There was deep water, people on roofs and in attics. People in the Superdome, at the convention center, without basic facilities, having lost their dignity, reduced to fighting amongst themselves for a place on a bus. Desperate folk-- and some "knuckleheads," to use Mayor Nagin's phrase-- looted what they could, although they could not carry or use much of it. For days, people sat in the punishing sun and humidity waiting for help. Everyone toted a backpack or an olive-green garbage bag. And it's not over.
America's generosity failed. Or to be more specific, the federal government made it impossible for America's generosity to succeed. We will respond to this new, greatest crisis. But the wound in the story is fresh, and will take time to heal.
Why did this part of the story end up looking like such a lie? In the best light, you could say that we didn't know how bad it would be. We were tomahawked. We did all we could. The disaster was just too great.
But President Bush has already nixed that explanation. The "results of the response have been unacceptable," he said, without actually saying he was personally sorry (he never does). [Update: he is now saying the response was "not enough."] [Read this prescient story about the coming disaster, written 100 days before it happened] [Former Clinton advisor Sidney Blumenthal sheds more light]
More likely, and more damaging to our collective psyche, the federal government and the people who elected it decided that poor people do not deserve America's best response. In fact, to extend this cockeyed logic, they got what they deserved for being poor. Race, too, factored into the equation at least subconsciously. Do you think that President Bush would've stayed on vacation as long as he did if the good (90% white) people of Nebraska had suffered a catastrophe of equal proportions?
Only one part of the American story pattern seems to match here: that the government itself is the enemy against which we have to guard. On NPR, I heard a poignant story from a man in Mississippi who said he was sleeping in a graveyard because it was more sanitary, among "cottonmouth moccasins" that always come out at times like these. If there was one thing you could tell President Bush, the interviewer asked, what would it be? "Bring our men from Iraq," he said after a grief-stricken silence. "They'd have more help here."
But let me pause to wipe the foam from my yellow-dog Democrat instinct.
We need a new story, maybe even a new America. The old story works part of the time, but it fails, and leaves us feeling stupid and cheated. Mayor Nagin said, "New Orleans will never be the same... In this time."
This old time, suggests Ray Nagin, is over. It's now time to
- Stop blaming poor people.
- Stop neglecting black people.
- Test through real actions if, indeed, global warming has anything to do with killer hurricanes (maybe, as a dear church friend, a respected scientist once told me, "This is just weather." But he also said, "If we don't do anything about global pollution, something bad will happen.").
- Stop looking for enemies outside our gates, and start cooperating with the world again.
The tale of the New America (with apologies to Robert Reich) might go like this: we are a proud, optimistic nation with a great heritage of individual action. We have recognized that in a global economy, and with many other forces beyond our control, we must forego some of this individualism in order to help people at home and abroad, and expect help in return. We do not rush to blame others, but look inside ourselves first. We are wounded from our slave-holding past, but we remember it and use it as an incentive to change for the better. We hold our land in deep esteem and protect it for future generations. And we have stopped believing in a national religion (that was never national) which divides sheep from goats. Instead, we are following Christ's charge to love our neighbors as ourselves.
We believe the future will be better, but we know that a better future comes through being true to our new story.
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