The Automatik

New Orleans and its surrounding cities and neighborhoods are no longer as I knew them. The coast of Mississippi has been changed forever. Bay St. Louis, Waveland, and Pass Christian are nothing but felled trees and splintered wood. My father and stepmother’s house has been crushed by a 20-foot storm surge that wreaked destruction five miles inland, lifting up their van and spinning it around and floating three strange sofas into their shattered and now-exposed living room. Their neighbors’ roof is now in their backyard, but there is no sign of the rest of that house. Even if they didn’t lose their houses outright, many members of my family, not to mention nearly everyone else I know that still lives there, have been rendered homeless and jobless for the foreseeable future.

I am from New Orleans -was born and raised there – and lived there until a few months ago. Obviously, I am horrified by what has happened due to Hurricane Katrina. What infuriates me, however, is the tenor of the commentary I have seen over the past few days, an infuriation that goes beyond the idiots who are blaming the area residents for not leaving or just living there in the first place.

I’ve been obsessively reading information on the Internet since the storm hit on August 29th. I feel confident that I’ve got a handle on what’s going on down there. I’m secure in the knowledge that it is much worse than what we’ve seen on TV or even what I’ve read and heard from first hand accounts of people who were down there, but managed to leave (like my brother) or who are still down there, reporting from the “front lines.”

I read an essay a few weeks back that commented on the race issue that has become such a hot button. It tried to explain that the city has a long history of poverty, drug-related violence, lack of education, and racial politics and that the infamous looters shouldn’t be blamed for stealing.

And I agree that New Orleans suffers from all those maladies, but I must be very clear: you are barely scratching the surface.

It makes sense to complain about the racism that is obviously a factor in this whole disaster. Many, if not the majority, of the people stranded and starving at the Superdome and the Convention Center were poor and black (or as Wolf Blitzer so idiotically phrased it, “so poor and so black.”) Factually, there is a majority black population in Orleans Parish as well as a tremendous amount of poverty. Factually, many of these people could not afford to leave or didn’t have the means. My heart absolutely breaks for them and my rage upon seeing the situation down there was quite unlike anything I have ever felt.

However, the media, in their greed to grab headlines and Nielsen ratings, have not presented all the facts (and I won’t even get into their arrogant ignorance about shotgun houses and the Lower Garden District here). St. Bernard Parish, in which 30,000 homes have been soaked in over fifteen feet of oily water, has a population that is about 88% white.

In addition, the Lakeview area, which is predominately white and middle-to-upper class, has met a similar watery fate. According to recent statistics from C&C Technologies, it’s been sitting under at least nine feet of water for nearly two weeks now. This is the neighborhood where, in a modest home, my grandparents raised two children, where my grandfather planted vegetables in the backyard before he died in 1982, where my grandmother walked to the “mini” to buy groceries before a heart attack and arthritis made that impossible, where I spent nearly every weekend of my childhood, a neighborhood in which I lived for eleven years before coming to Canada.

It’s where water poured in so fast from the lake that another family member didn’t even have time to put on a pair of shoes before climbing to the roof. He clung to the gutter for seven hours before being rescued by a helicopter. And this neighborhood is gone. Sure, you can rebuild a house after a fire, but how do you rebuild an entire neighborhood? Or a lifetime of memories? And where do all these people, many of them elderly, go in the meantime? Hurricane Katrina was deadly, but she did not discriminate. She left that task to others.

While I do agree that the news reports have been terribly biased by calling white folks “finders” and black folks “looters,” this is not the time or the place to allow that specific issue to distract us too much from the gravity of this situation, which is far more insidious than biased photo captions. Human beings have lost everything – including their lives – human beings who are black as well as those who are white. I am not complaining about looting; if you need to eat and feed your family – to survive – you do what you gotta do.

I’m saddened and angered by the people (both black and white) stealing jewelry, electronics, and other property. Not because of some twisted devotion to Capitalism as was suggested by one online blogger. One commenter actually had the balls to say that storeowners shouldn’t get upset because their merchandise was insured. This is so shortsighted as to be downright ignorant.

There are not just a few stores that were looted. The entire inventory of a majority of stores has been decimated, from the downtown core of New Orleans to the Lower Garden District to the suburbs of Jefferson Parish. Saying that “insurance will handle it” is like a knife in the heart to the plethora of business owners who also live in the area and who, if they haven’t lost their homes outright, have certainly suffered major damage to them. There have also been countless fires which have managed to destroy homes and businesses and which weren’t all the result of broken gas lines.

What commenters like this fail to understand is that there is more to the insurance issue than stolen merchandise. There are the effects of the storm itself. There is a difference between homeowners insurance and flood insurance. Homeowners will only allow claims for damage if it wasn’t caused by what adjusters deem to be caused by a flood. Technically, rain and rising water are considered flood damage. That is covered under flood insurance (which is not mandatory and which is expensive). These companies are considering “flood damage” to include billions of gallons of water pouring from a lake or an entire bay of water being propelled by 160 mph winds and wiping out houses like they were made of paper and toothpicks. At least 100,000 homes have been reduced to rubble. For this, some citizens of Louisiana and the Governor of Mississippi are suing several major insurance companies to force the issue.

There is already an insurance crisis of major proportions in Louisiana; I can’t imagine what havoc this will cause. The Louisiana State Insurance Commissioner has promised the storm’s aftermath won’t exacerbate it. But can he stop it from happening?

I know that the looters were just stealing because they could. But some of this wasn’t looting to survive; it was destruction for destruction’s sake. The looting didn’t start when the levees broke and water filled the previously unflooded CBD and French Quarter. The pharmacy at Winn Dixie was wiped clean before the water rose. While Katrina was pummelling the Mississippi Gulf Coast, people were looting the Canal Street Foot Action shoe store and then subsequently torching it.

I know that to the impoverished residents of New Orleans it’s been hell to watch the city kiss the asses of every white tourist to who comes to Mardi Gras and then proceeds to piss, vomit, and shit all over the city. After all, it’s the impoverished residents, working minimum wage jobs, who then have to clean up that mess. They do so knowing that the police will look the other way, and that the politicians will continue to throw money on the woefully mismanaged bureaucracy of government programs like Head Start, which ostensibly aims to save all these children born into lives of poverty, crime, and drug abuse, but which fails miserably in the process. But don’t try to act like two weeks of man-made ruin is not going to have an impact on the recovery of New Orleans and the surrounding areas. Whether it is justified or not, it will affect everyone.

And that brings me to another point. On one online community I’d say about half of the comments are made by New Orleanians and about half are made by fans of the city. The outpouring there has been phenomenal. People are doing everything they can to help, one Canadian woman going so far as to say she’d pay for a refugee’s bus ticket up there and would provide room and board.

But many of the comments I have read have been made by people who are quite obviously not from New Orleans (and if they are, they should be ashamed). This is because they are obfuscating the situation with a bunch of political rants. Troubling reports from the Washington Post and the New York Times have only served to further convince me that it is not just one politician who has played a part in the destruction of New Orleans. I was not a Bush fan before this situation. As I’ve complained elsewhere, I feel he acted too slowly after the situation started to rapidly deteriorate. Michael Brown from FEMA is a new breed of ignorant jackass as far as I’m concerned and I can’t tell you how grateful I am that he has resigned his post.

As for Mayor Nagin, I was impressed by his crackdown on apathy, corruption, and race politics when I lived there. Has he handled the situation adequately, or even well? Only time will tell where all the breakdowns and failures occurred and I don’t claim to begin to understand the bureaucracy that has made this situation worse. But did Nagin get everyone’s attention by ranting, raving, and weeping on TV? Yes. For that, I applaud him. Governor Blanco is a blubbering mess, but I am not surprised by her weakness because I have never been impressed by her. “I am furious,” she schoolmarmed about the looting and the violence.

Oh, did I not mention the violence yet? Let’s get to that. The few online commenters that were violence apologists made me sick. Don’t tell me that those brandishing guns and knives and assaulting, raping, and killing people were crazy from the heat or just trying to survive. Please. The crime statistics in New Orleans were outrageous before this mess. Many, if not most, of the violent crimes were drug-related. And since crack is the drug of choice and crack is cheap, these criminals were not wealthy enough to have the means to escape.

While we’re (not) playing the blame game, I’d like to mention again that many of the people stranded in the city were poor and had no means to escape. They were living (and dying) in fear and squalor but it took days to get help. Is that because many them were black or poor? They were sensational enough to film, but not to help? While I appreciate that CNN reporters showed what was going on first hand, I must ask: how did the media get in and set up camp on Canal Street but the Red Cross and other aid organizations were turned away by FEMA? Why was anyone turned away who wanted to help?

These stranded starving people feared for their lives and safety because “looters” stole weapons and ammunition from a local Wal-Mart and were terrorizing the city. (It must be noted that this is the Wal-Mart that was the center of a storm of controversy before it was even built – on the site of the decrepit St. Thomas Housing Project – because residents feared it was going to ruin the local character of the Lower Garden District.)

When I first started writing this piece, I firmly believed that if anyone tried to take over a truck with medical supplies for dying people, then that person needed to be stopped. I firmly believed that if someone was going to shoot at National Guardsmen and rescue workers coming to evacuate sick patients at a hospital struggling under six feet of water and no power, then that sort of behavior should not be tolerated. But I no longer feel that way.

Charmaine Neville (who was in the Ninth Ward during and after the storm) has told a harrowing story, including a statement that after hours of National Guard helicopters ignoring them, the people she was with were shooting at the rescue helicopters for attention, not to kill them. This is heartbreaking and horrifying. But what of the others who took advantage of the situation, the ones that Ms. Neville also describes? They were maiming and killing before the hurricane came through; it’s just easier now because no one could stop it. Not when the less dedicated members of the NOPD were stealing money from ATMs and safes and shooting at people because they were shell-shocked and couldn’t tell the difference and didn’t care.

The NOPD has a long history of corruption and mismanagement, from the embarrassment of Antoinette Frank to skewed murder statistics. Residency requirements force NOPD members to live within the Orleans Parish boundaries, the same parish with the high crime and poverty rate and terrible public school systems. No one should have been surprised when these men and women, already dwindling in numbers, couldn’t handle the post-Katrina environment.

It’s telling when some of the people stranded at the Convention Center were trying to sweep and clean up the place so that cops, National Guardsmen, and the media would realize they weren’t “dangerous.” They didn’t want to further prejudice the National Guard and the police force into shooting first and asking questions later, not to mention confiscating registered weapons from non-violent residents – a situation that has stirred up a hornet’s nest of Second Amendment issues, no matter what your stance is on gun control laws. It’s telling when one young man stole a bus to drive over 100 of the stranded to Houston to save them. But yet, I’ve only seen this mentioned once on TV and a Google search of “Jabbar Gibson” only shows an article from the Houston Chronicle’s website. There are more stories of black people saving and helping others, but the mainstream media isn’t reporting on these heroic tales. If this doesn’t show you how terribly pathetic we are as a nation, then I don’t know what can.

Yet this is not the time for political debates on these issues. I’d like to see what would have happened if any of these people arguing about Democrats vs. Republicans had been down there, trying to reason with the criminal element. I’d like to know if they know what it’s like to walk down a New Orleans street at night, pre-Katrina, and be absolutely terrified because there are people there who have no regard for human life. I’d like to see them try to have a lively, intellectual discussion on racial politics with someone who is on a quest for a bag of rocks. They will not understand you and they will not care. That is not the way to fix the problem.

My father teaches at a school in rural Mississippi with kids who would be in prison if this school did not give them one more chance. They are violent and they are angry. They have not had easy lives; poverty, drug addiction, molestation, murder, and rape are par for the course. He tries to help them realize that they have something to offer and that there is hope. He cares about these kids like you would not believe. Political battles have no place here and when they take precedence, the kids end up being the losers (and if you know anything at all about the Orleans Parish School Board, you’ll know exactly what I mean). Since that school and the surrounding area have been wiped off the map, where do these kids go now?

Do I think that racism is a problem in New Orleans? Absolutely. Do I think that the fact that the majority of the area’s black population is poor is a result of institutionalized racism? Without a doubt. Why do you think the post-Katrina civil war erupted down there in the first place? Kanye West said that George Bush doesn’t care about black people. I think a more accurate statement is that a lot of Americans generally don’t care about other people at all, certain of the fact that the poor are that way by their own design because they refuse to pull themselves up by their (non-existent) bootstraps.

But this is not New Orleans’ problem, or Louisiana’s problem, or even Mississippi or Alabama’s problem. This is AMERICA’S problem. If you don’t think that the aftershocks of this are going to affect the entire country, you are a fool. Not just in rising gas prices, or an insurance nightmare, but the fact that the buffer zone of islands off the Gulf Coast are now gone, leaving the rest of the area much more vulnerable to future storms, not to mention the environmental and economic impact which we cannot even begin to grasp at this point. And then there are the “looters.” If you don’t think that this type of Third World scenario could happen in your town if there was a natural disaster or terrorist attack, then you’d better pray that you are right.

I didn’t hear anyone worrying about the situation in New Orleans before. It was always, “Oh, what a cool town!” or “You can party down there 24 hours a day!” and “Why would you want to leave?” I wanted to leave because the crime and the apathy and the racism were absolutely deplorable. And it has taken the nation’s biggest catastrophic disaster to show the entire WORLD what New Orleans is all about. And aren’t we proud of our city? President Bush noted that the “deep, persistent poverty” and “history of racial discrimination” have now been seen by the nation on television. Not all of us have seen this for the first time on CNN, Mr. President.

New Orleans, despite Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert’s ridiculous notions, can and must be rebuilt. As the largest port in the United States and the fifth-largest in the world, there is no alternative. President Bush has promised billions to foster the largest reconstruction process since the Civil War. As we know, however, throwing money on a problem does not make it go away. Throwing money on New Orleans, a city with a long history of political and police corruption, could be the nation’s second largest and most expensive disaster.

The process hasn’t even begun yet and we’ve already got problems. Representative William Jefferson commandeered National Guard troops to check on his home and belongings so he could gather a box of possessions, which may or may not have included documents related to claims that he embezzled money to finance illegal business deals in Nigeria. An FBI Tip Hotline has been set up to report fraud but is this going to protect residents against the politicians and police?

FEMA has set up a website with forms for refugees to apply for help. With an illiteracy rate of about 40% and a poverty rate of about 30%, do you think these people were surfing the net at home? Where is the assistance to help them complete these online forms? And if residents did stay at home, in a city with no power, how did FEMA propose that they access the site?

Racism rears its ugly head yet again when we consider the actual reconstruction and repopulation of the city. The L.A. Times has made spurious claims that racism is preventing black residents from visiting their flood-damaged homes. However, it is not difficult to see how many of the city’s poor black residents, who could not afford to leave in the first place, will not be able to afford to come back. Even if their houses won’t be razed like those in St. Bernard and Lakeview, the Orleans Parish School System is bankrupt and pleading for Federal funds, so where will their kids go to school?

I left New Orleans for a reason. I hated what it had become – I hated the racism, the poverty, the crime, and the apathy that infected every aspect of the city. But I loved my neighborhood and the fact that I knew all the neighbors on my street as well as their pets, and I wonder if they all made it out alive. I loved driving to my dad and stepmom’s Bay St. Louis home, listening to music while the fog from the lake floated over the moon. The road to that lake is under water now. I loved the crawfish boils that we had every Easter at my aunt’s house. There’s no seafood industry in New Orleans for the time being. All of these traditions are only memories now. It’s not that they are continuing without me; they simply aren’t continuing.

No matter how long I live, I will never get over this tragedy. There will always be a hole in my heart, a piece of my soul missing. My entire life’s history – family, friends, good times, bad times – is tied to that place. No matter how many pictures I see, the pain remains. It may diminish with time, but it will always be there.

Although I moved to be reunited with my husband in the hopes that opportunities for a bright future would be better for both of us in Canada, I feel guilty for giving up on the city, for knocking it, for telling people not to move there. Maybe if I’d been more positive I could have made a difference. But I’m telling you now that it is not the time for hysterical partisan screaming; it’s time for action. Don’t use this crisis as a platform to further your political agenda. Don’t forget about this catastrophe when the next crisis comes along. Do something to help, or get the hell out of the way.

If you would like to see supporting documentation for the ideas presented in this article, please email me at theautomatik@gmail.com.

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