Progressive Nation

October 8th, 2005

One Natural Disaster and Many Human Ones (A Speech on Hurricane Katrina)

The following is the text of a short speech that I delivered last night at a Hurricane Katrina benefit concert held in the University Chapel:

“It’s now been over a month since that fatefall morning on August 29th when Hurricane Katrina made landfall near Buras, Louisiana. At that time, my family and I sat around the TV in Dallas watching and waiting to see what would happen to our house, our home, and our community.

We hoped the levees would hold and that the pumps would work as they should… but that was not to be. That night, and the next day, and into the next, we sat watching glassy-eyed, as the situation went from bad, to worse, to catastrophic. Looters-of all races, mind you-broke into stores, some searching for food and water on which to live and others searching for vengeance and for payback. Rescuers tried their best to save people but with communications down, they found their efforts to be greatly hampered.

This is the story we’ve all heard- both you and I. We all know about the incompetence of the politicians– both local and federal, Democrat and Republican. We all know about the failure of those heading the relief efforts to act swiftly, appropriately, and effectively. We all know this, and those individuals responsible have felt the repercussions.

But perhaps we’ve been learning the wrong lessons from the Hurricane. As Princeton Prof. Eddie Glaude explained at a panel examining the Hurricane’s aftermath “Katrina displayed the disaster that was already among us.”

Before the Hurricane transformed it back into a swamp, New Orleans stood as a monument to our inability as a nation to confront the problem of urban poverty. One out of every four New Orleans residents, most of them black, lived below the poverty line. Every morning, these individuals sent their children off to learn– or fail to learn- at some of the worst public schools in the entire nation. During the day, they went to work at jobs that often didn’t pay enough to make ends meet. At night, they returned home to dilapidated slums and dangerous housing projects.

These were the people that society forgot- these were the people that society did its best to ignore.

Not surprisingly, when the hurricane loomed perilously close in the Gulf of Mexico and evacuation orders were issued telling residents to get out of town, the poor of New Orleans, of Mississippi, of Alabama, of our country, were ignored again. The one-third of New Orleans households without an automobile- three times the national average- had no way of leaving the city. No buses came along to pick them up. They were left to fend completely for themselves.

Major events fade quickly into memory, and the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina will probably not be an exception to this rule. But I cling to the hope that this natural disaster will lift the veil of invisibility cloaking the human disasters that lurk in cities across the nation.

Give money to help those effected by Hurricane Katrina, but I implore all of you: please don’t stop there.”

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 8th, 2005 at 5:11 pm and is filed under Moral Values. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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