Reflections on a Catastrophe: Long and draftish.

As a recent MPA grad, what I will say definitively is this: Hurricane Katrina is the end all be all greatest case study that Public Administration (which is a solid off-shoot of politics, as politics is borne of philosophy, but that's a separate discussion) in the U.S. has seen: 48 different agencies at 9 governmental and nongovernmental levels, 14 various social problems, and a 200+ year history of urban planning were and are all in play in how this catastrophe has played out.

On the contrary, while it is crystal clear that the government response to Katrina was not what it could or should have been, I will have to reserve judgment and take in more facts, opinions, and accounts before I pass judgment or waive a finger of blame too vigorously at any one politician or group.

In some sense, I think a significant and long standing American habit of mind and way of thinking is at play here: that we are a special or different or God-chosen or generally above the fray people who "bad things," in a sort of collective, apocalyptic way, do not happen too, as they do, with a constant ferociousness, to other people in other parts of the world. This belief has been solidly cemented and reinforced by the advent and domination of the 24-hour image-driven news media. Numerous psychological studies demonstrate that a healthy majority of the American public now base their perceptions on the realities they see on TV more so than realities witnessed elsewhere with their own senses. The overt and muted massage of advertising tells us that as long as we play along with the song and dance of consuming goods and accepting image appropriately, we will be spared from the dreadful and hackneyed fates of this mortal world; not exempting in the least aging, dying, and death.

New Orleans, in a sense, was always a fantasy of sustainable form. Here we have a sinking city, on its one bank the mighty Mississippi, which overran its banks by a distance of some 60 miles in 1927, and on the other bank Lake Pontchartrain, sitting some 14 feet higher than the sea level of the city. The levee system was only "designed" to withstand a Category 3 storm, while only 13 years earlier a Category 5 made landfall on the shores of the same gulf. Whether a man-made levee-- which is commonly beset by failure in floods of lesser magnitude-- can be fully relied upon to endure 160 mile an hour winds and 20 foot storm surge is an important question unto itself. Populations which exist in the path of such tempests live with the risk of their wrath, and New Orleans was no exception, but rather a most poignant rule. Why a massive earthquake in the San Francisco region would be any less devastating, I do not know. Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.

What has little, if anything, to do with nature, however, was in how this catastrophe played out. It was a tale of two cities. The predominantly white, affluent and mobile population made it out safely while the poor, African American underclass did not. Here, New Orleans is no exception at all. Our society—and particularly our larger cities-- are profoundly segregated by race and class. The dark skinned demographic of Katrina’s victims reflect the colors of our prison population and standing army. Whether American societies’ rife divisions will be diminished or augmented in 100 or 200 years I do not know, but the gap, both real and imagined, between the rich and poor is growing at a steady pace, and the successful integration—in terms of widespread advancement in measures of citizenship and economic prosperity- of our former slave class has never been fully realized or achieved.

9/11 was a failure of imagination, but an excusable one: the horrific and unspeakable means of attacking a civilian population was on a scale the world had not seen… Katrina was not a failure of imagination. She was a very real and plain threat that time would eventually deliver to the city’s doorstep.

What has very much to with imagination are our current President’s justifications for going to war in the Middle East. Here, he is to be faulted for the diversion of the precious resource of our National Guard to foreign soil, and history will judge him unfavorably for that campaign. Whether, in the end, his administration is to be duly faulted, more than any previous administration, for the loss of life caused by this particular catastrophe, I do not know.

The good news is that the task of learning from our peril and mistakes and bad luck in reckoning with nature’s destructive power provide for painful, yet plain and straightforward lessons and instruction for how to avoid future calamity and loss. The bad news, which many commentators have harped upon in recent days, is that natural disaster exposes more than the sheer force of wind, water, earth, and fire. The job of preventing the type of gross abuse of power which perhaps crippled our ability to deal with this very disaster, and of over coming the social divisions which defined its outcome, exist on a much more Herculean scale. Coming to grips with how far our country has yet to come in those arenas might be a necessary first step in making real strides toward their improvement.