Remembering the Levees: Obligation and Opportunity Four Years After Katrina

Hurricane Katrina hit on August 29th, 2005. The storm would kill more than 1600 people, displace thousands more and cause more than $40 billion in property damage. The Bush administrations deplorable response to the crisis made many question the US government's commitment and capacity to care for it's most vulnerable citizens. For years on, our obligation to help New Orleans rebuild remains as strong as ever, but in doing so we must also recognize the incredible passion of those who would see the rebuilding as an opportunity for renaissance.

Obligation:

In August of 205, my comprehension of Katrina was colored by having just spent the last three months visiting nonprofit organizations in the post (or ongoing) conflict zones. It was mind boggling to have just spent months in and around refugee camps to then return, see the construction of our very own version of them in the middle of football stadiums, and to watch politicians desperately try to explain it away without using the word "refugee."

Crisis forces us into confrontation with ourselves, individually and as a group. I think for many, the (lack of) response to Katrina showed the callousness of the Bush administration more clearly even than the Iraq war.

I dug up an old piece I wrote on September 2, 2005 but never published. I want to quote it extensively here, not because I think it offers any profound insight or analysis, but because the sheer raw helplessness of my response expresses relatively accurately how many felt then, and perhaps reminds us that anger was and is justified, and our obligation remains:

To watch television news today is to see a world entirely beyond our own reckoning of ourselves. It is to see an entirely different potential reality - the potential, that is, that we Americans may just be liable to the same insanities, impulses, brutalities, and tragedies that afflict the rest of our seething world - that there is something beyond us (call it Nature, God, or whatever you'd like) that does not care what our gross domestic anything is or indeed, how much freedom we have. It is to see a reality which we have been trying desperately (and with much success) to bury under our own mythology for centuries.

The two-hundred and whatever million of us unaffected sit on our couches watching something that can't possibly, can't fathomably be happening here. Reporters who choke up as they see bodies float by; rescue workers uncovering heating ducts and finding suffocating old women; rape gangs and twitching drug addicts roaming lawless streets; phone calls from people up to their necks in rising water saying they just might not be able to make it home any more; looters (or is it desperately hungry human beings?) breaking into any store that might conceivably have some sort of provisions; tens of thousands of people stuffed into a football stadium without water or food waiting for the cavalry that got caught up in something else and a government that dithers. We watch an entire government system which, at every level it seems, simply cannot do what is needed. They cannot even say what is needed.

Here we are, and we dither. We do not send the troops where they are called for. We do not call on the provisions of our laws and history which give our leaders extreme power in truly desperate situations. We cannot, even in this moment when we are laid at our most bare, the moment when every politician's rhetoric falls short by definition, when a huge number of our own cease to be Americans first and are forced to survive, to desperately cling to life and family and hope by whatever means necessary - even in this moment we cannot let ourselves for a second believe that when it comes down to it we are just the same as everyone else - that the worms do not care where we were born.

As the bodies float by, the reporters stand agape. The politicians, conservative, liberal, red, blue, green, pink, brown, whatever, cannot bring themselves to say words like "refugee." There are troops now, finally, and a truck or two as well. But how many more than necessary died because of delays and planning and squibbling, squabbling stupidity? The citizens of this great nation, the place that Old Abe once called "the last best hope for the world", stare with disbelief.

We are called into confrontation with ourselves and who knows, now, what it means to be American? Hunter S. Thompson once wrote that the Kentucky Derby was a "jaded, atavistic freak out with nothing to recommend it but a very saleable "tradition,"" and I can't help but wonder, now, if it isn't the same with our unyielding faith in America.

Opportunity:

An amazing thing, though, has happened in the four years since then. While the government's response was lackluster, the citizens of this country didn't miss a beat. People young and old and of all political persuasions found creative ways to help, either by raising money and other resources for the Red Cross and other relief organizations or by actually making the trip to volunteer in the hardest hit areas of the Gulf region.

What's more, the response has not been limited to short term volunteers and donations. Tulane University, basically submerged in the flooding, has been reborn as a university of choice for students who want to both get an education and demonstrate their commitment. The inaugural Clinton Global Initiative University program was held at the school in 2007 where university president Scott Cowen affirmed his commitment to making Tulane the place where students come to learn how to serve their country.

What's more, residents of the Gulf old and new are rebuilding or reigniting new cultural, nonprofit, and entrepreneurial organizations in an effort not just to solve the problems created by Katrina, but to point the face of the Gulf forwarded to a 21st century with less poverty, higher literacy, better jobs, better access to health care, storm-proof homes, and more.

All Day Buffet has done an incredible job uncovering the full range of amazing work happening particularly in New Orleans. Their list of the "New Orleans 100" are the 100 most creative, exciting, forward looking projects and organizations across categories including Art and Architecture, Music, Creative, Nonprofit, Entrepreneurship, Social Innovation, and more.

And the Louisiana government has embraced social entrepreneurship as a part of the rebuilding process. In 2006, Lt. Governer Mitch Landrieu launched the first state-level Office of Social Entrepreneurship in the country. The office holds workshops and training sessions, advocates for social innovators on the state level, and hosts a business plan competition.

**

As crisis often does, Hurricane Katrina exposed the best and worst of America. Our bumbling response to a disaster that, if not human created was amplified in impact by our neglect of the protection the Gulf region needed, revealed much about our capacity and our psyche. But we - both the citizens of that region and all those who have found ways to support them - have also shown the deep creative optimism of the American Spirit.

There is much to be done, but four years after the disaster it seems clear that the best way to commemorate those who lost their lives is to invest in the incredible emergent ecosystem of those who would use this new opportunity to not simply to rebuild but to advance.

For more information about how much remains to be done, read US Poverty blogger Leigh's post, which has a ton of information about poverty in the Gulf and how to get involved.

(Photo: Affrodite.net)