(no subject)
Oct. 14th, 2005 09:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynGiven where I spent the first two weeks of September, my desire at this point to make a joke about the art supply store I visited this week having run out of gopher wood but still offering cubit-to-metric measurement converters is really nothing more than an urge to whine. So I'll skip that; there's enough whining in the world already.
I'll speak instead of an impression I've gotten from the news. It may be wrong. I'd be happier if it were wrong, certainly. The impression is this: that Katrina, like 9/11, represents a phenomenal opportunity, wasted. After the planes smacked into the Towers and the Pentagon and the field in Pennsylvania, the world looked on us- for a time- with a kind of sympathy and willingness to be decent that I don't think any nation has had since the end of the Second World War. The citizenry of the United States, from what I could tell, would have accepted just about any initiative offered them by the government at that point if they thought it would make things better or help prevent another horror. We fingered the enemy responsible, and then we went off to war, and the only initiatives offered us had names like 'the war on terror' and 'stand united', and the chance to change the country for the better passed us by.
I am … scared, I think the best word might be … that Katrina is the same way.
See, when the storm hit, when the pictures started coming to the rest of the country, people were horrified. And rightly so. People wanted to help, wanted to do anything they could. I know that when the Red Cross called me on August 27th (I do not think I will ever quite trust the end of August again, as that weekend of 2001 was the weekend I went up the Empire State Building and took pictures of the Towers), I spent most of the evening and a lot of the next day fretting. I chose to call the Red Cross on Monday after getting my boss's permission because I felt, not guilty, but impotent. I think a lot of people felt the same way when the pictures came in and they saw what Katrina had done. Storms are good for that. They leave you feeling helpless in the path of something so much stronger than you that there is nothing to do but cower and wait, and then when they leave you want nothing better than to sit on the floor and cry for a while.
The people of America wanted to help, when Katrina came. Wanted it more than they'd wanted anything in a very long time. They lunged forward to help like an Alaskan sled dog who sees his harness and knows he'll have the chance to run. The possibilities were bandied about, of trying to implement a new policy towards disaster victims and the poor-
And then the stories started circulating on the Net about how horrible and filthy and inhuman refugees (evacuees? storm victims? name your word) were. Untrue stories, when the local governments named in the stories were asked to confirm or deny, but stories circulating nonetheless. Stories about how the people evacuated were ungrateful bastards make it ever so much easier to justify not helping, because who could argue that such animals deserved assistance?
Then Rick Santorum started talking about how the people who hadn't evacuated should be penalized. Never mind that the majority of them were too poor to be able to afford to get out of the way, that they were holding on to what little they had because they didn't think they'd see it again if they once left it. Never mind that they were being asked to trust a government that had never given a shit about them before. They didn't get out of the way? Hit them until they don't get up again, that's the answer.
And then the existing government protections for the poor were blamed for people being unwilling to leave their homes, because they obviously had lost all initiative and expected to be taken away without having to act. (See: shafting the poor, history of.)
And then the government said, well, we Feds might not have responded adequately, but the city government didn't either, and the state government didn't either, and these people just sit around waiting for the next higher level of government to act because graft is so endemic in Louisiana that you might as well try to get rid of all the rats in New York, so why should we?
I have a fear that this will only continue. That the government, and then the citizenry, will say "well, these people were poor to begin with, and they're still poor now, and they just didn't try hard enough. If they really wanted to, they could try harder and be respectable, but they're not, so screw them. Business as usual." That the good will and compassion of the American people before the storm and in the early days of the response will vanish completely and the only lasting legacy of Katrina will be a desire to put oil refineries somewhere other than the Gulf region so they don't all get wiped out at one blow.
I don't know how to prevent that. I wish I did. I do know that there is a sad, quiet little voice in my head, and that it says this: the only thing that will change matters, the only way that America will muster any kind of will for lasting change, is if that which hurts the poor hurts everyone. This country has little or no use for cooperative compromise any more, small interest in group action. We've been spoiled. We want our burgers Our Way and our music laid out on our players or offered by radio stations that advertise "we play what WE want". We can buy our sneakers customized down to the last detail. We select candidates for the Supreme Court because they're people we know and personally like, even if they don't have any experience of being judges. In the face of this much customization, this much tailoring-the-world-to-the-individual, the only thing that's going to get America to change its attitude towards the poor and towards an unjust political and social system is if conditions overall get bad enough that everyone hurts. It'll touch the individual pocket and ruin the individual life of enough people that something will have to be done, even if it means rearranging the tax base into something completely unrecognizable- not a thing I look forward to but it's not as if good intentions pay for change, now is it.
This is what I'm afraid of, that nothing will change until everything gets so bad that the only alternative is –
… uh, I think I have to stop now; the TV here in the office started running the Aaron Neville PSA for the Red Cross, and if I keep up in this vein I'm going to lose it.
All I'm going to say is: I hope I'm wrong, and that compassion does not require nationwide pain to be put into action. That empathy and imagination will be enough to overcome inertia and attitudes.
I hope.
I'll speak instead of an impression I've gotten from the news. It may be wrong. I'd be happier if it were wrong, certainly. The impression is this: that Katrina, like 9/11, represents a phenomenal opportunity, wasted. After the planes smacked into the Towers and the Pentagon and the field in Pennsylvania, the world looked on us- for a time- with a kind of sympathy and willingness to be decent that I don't think any nation has had since the end of the Second World War. The citizenry of the United States, from what I could tell, would have accepted just about any initiative offered them by the government at that point if they thought it would make things better or help prevent another horror. We fingered the enemy responsible, and then we went off to war, and the only initiatives offered us had names like 'the war on terror' and 'stand united', and the chance to change the country for the better passed us by.
I am … scared, I think the best word might be … that Katrina is the same way.
See, when the storm hit, when the pictures started coming to the rest of the country, people were horrified. And rightly so. People wanted to help, wanted to do anything they could. I know that when the Red Cross called me on August 27th (I do not think I will ever quite trust the end of August again, as that weekend of 2001 was the weekend I went up the Empire State Building and took pictures of the Towers), I spent most of the evening and a lot of the next day fretting. I chose to call the Red Cross on Monday after getting my boss's permission because I felt, not guilty, but impotent. I think a lot of people felt the same way when the pictures came in and they saw what Katrina had done. Storms are good for that. They leave you feeling helpless in the path of something so much stronger than you that there is nothing to do but cower and wait, and then when they leave you want nothing better than to sit on the floor and cry for a while.
The people of America wanted to help, when Katrina came. Wanted it more than they'd wanted anything in a very long time. They lunged forward to help like an Alaskan sled dog who sees his harness and knows he'll have the chance to run. The possibilities were bandied about, of trying to implement a new policy towards disaster victims and the poor-
And then the stories started circulating on the Net about how horrible and filthy and inhuman refugees (evacuees? storm victims? name your word) were. Untrue stories, when the local governments named in the stories were asked to confirm or deny, but stories circulating nonetheless. Stories about how the people evacuated were ungrateful bastards make it ever so much easier to justify not helping, because who could argue that such animals deserved assistance?
Then Rick Santorum started talking about how the people who hadn't evacuated should be penalized. Never mind that the majority of them were too poor to be able to afford to get out of the way, that they were holding on to what little they had because they didn't think they'd see it again if they once left it. Never mind that they were being asked to trust a government that had never given a shit about them before. They didn't get out of the way? Hit them until they don't get up again, that's the answer.
And then the existing government protections for the poor were blamed for people being unwilling to leave their homes, because they obviously had lost all initiative and expected to be taken away without having to act. (See: shafting the poor, history of.)
And then the government said, well, we Feds might not have responded adequately, but the city government didn't either, and the state government didn't either, and these people just sit around waiting for the next higher level of government to act because graft is so endemic in Louisiana that you might as well try to get rid of all the rats in New York, so why should we?
I have a fear that this will only continue. That the government, and then the citizenry, will say "well, these people were poor to begin with, and they're still poor now, and they just didn't try hard enough. If they really wanted to, they could try harder and be respectable, but they're not, so screw them. Business as usual." That the good will and compassion of the American people before the storm and in the early days of the response will vanish completely and the only lasting legacy of Katrina will be a desire to put oil refineries somewhere other than the Gulf region so they don't all get wiped out at one blow.
I don't know how to prevent that. I wish I did. I do know that there is a sad, quiet little voice in my head, and that it says this: the only thing that will change matters, the only way that America will muster any kind of will for lasting change, is if that which hurts the poor hurts everyone. This country has little or no use for cooperative compromise any more, small interest in group action. We've been spoiled. We want our burgers Our Way and our music laid out on our players or offered by radio stations that advertise "we play what WE want". We can buy our sneakers customized down to the last detail. We select candidates for the Supreme Court because they're people we know and personally like, even if they don't have any experience of being judges. In the face of this much customization, this much tailoring-the-world-to-the-individual, the only thing that's going to get America to change its attitude towards the poor and towards an unjust political and social system is if conditions overall get bad enough that everyone hurts. It'll touch the individual pocket and ruin the individual life of enough people that something will have to be done, even if it means rearranging the tax base into something completely unrecognizable- not a thing I look forward to but it's not as if good intentions pay for change, now is it.
This is what I'm afraid of, that nothing will change until everything gets so bad that the only alternative is –
… uh, I think I have to stop now; the TV here in the office started running the Aaron Neville PSA for the Red Cross, and if I keep up in this vein I'm going to lose it.
All I'm going to say is: I hope I'm wrong, and that compassion does not require nationwide pain to be put into action. That empathy and imagination will be enough to overcome inertia and attitudes.
I hope.
