Revisiting National Disasters

We're a very strange country. I wrote this during the Virginia Tech shooting massacre and still think it's worth considering.



I'm appalled by the massacre at Virginia Tech. I grieve with Blacksburg and the Hokies, and for our nation, which, to paraphrase Jack Cafferty, seems to have a monopoly on campus massacres.

Maybe I'm projecting, but I have to think that, as the days grind on, the sympathetic focus on the horror at Virginia Tech must be difficult for New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. That is, the relentless spotlight, all but totally decontextualized, on the slayings of 33 people must be doubly painful for residents of a region whose losses numbered in the thousands.

I mean that since the folk in New Orleans and on the Mississippi Gulf Coast are as capable as the rest of us of selfless grief and feelings of horror, I know they are joined with the rest of us in shocked outrage and deep sympathetic concern.
Yet I can't see how they can help but contrast the outpouring of unalloyed compassion directed at VA Tech, the national rally to find prevention protocols, and the President's instant come-a-callin' sympathy, with the nation's cheap, mean-spirited, and hostile reaction to the people drowned by the levee failure and wiped out on the Gulf Coast during Hurricane Katrina.

We're a very strange country. No flags flew half-staffed for New Orleans, Gulfport, or Pass Christian--not that I recall, anyway.

I'm not saying that the response to VA Tech is inappropriate. I'm saying that the nation’s response to Katrina was and continues to be grotesque, shabby, scolding, and parsimonious, to put it mildly.

Questions wander in my mind, each one trailing unthinkable implications about competence, negligence, political affiliation, class, race, social position, power, fraud, and profiteering. Questions whose answers don't necessarily align neatly. Questions that just won’t go away.

I write in hopes that there are others who have not forgotten, and who are willing to shine a relentless spotlight on our Gulf South until we respond with dignity, justice, and compassion.

Massacres are horrible whether they're engineered by bad levees or by messed-up boys with pistols. National tragedies are national tragedies whether they’re man-made or weather-born. In the end, it isn't the cause or even the magnitude of a disaster that defines it in our national memory. It's what we do for the survivors.

I wonder what kind of people we are that we will not ensure our own children a safe and affordable education, and that we have not ensured that our own fellow citizens are at least made whole in housing and safe in civil infrastructure.

There are some things a decent people just do.

We aren't doing them. We're a very strange people.