camwyn | (no subject)

Given 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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Wish I could say something encouraging, but I already sort of gave up on this particular hope.

I think the compassion is still there, only it has a hell of an uphill road to travel now.

That's all I can say, because otherwise I pretty much agree with you.

I think it would probably take a disaster that affects a shedload of rich folks and poor folks en masse to help shift that blockage in the American psyche.
And as there's a couple of people in California I am rather fond of, it slipping into the sea after 'the big one' is not one I fancy seeing in my lifetime, but you get the point.

Sigh.

Back to writing polemics about bad starship design systems.

What it takes is leadership--and the people we have running things (and I don't limit that to the Republican Party, alas) are not willing to lay it on the line to make the push, either because their agenda is something altogether different, or because they haven't got the guts for the fight, or because they think they can't win...whatever. I include the media in this as well--too many were willing to push the rampaging violent looters meme without a second thought. It also takes leadership to push the government accountability thing.

The only people I see being willing to take a stand on this issue are churches and charitable organizations, and too many church groups aren't making a noisy stand against Pat Robertson's "good people are rich because God loves them, bad people are poor because that's what they deserve" heresy.

Like 9/11, people would have responded to constructive leadership. To a large extent, this hasn't been delivered. The media aren't the only people to blame here, but they have, too often, contributed to the problem by consenting to support the administration's agenda. I suspect there are more people out there who are becoming productively engaged in their communities, who are becoming involved in helping to make things better--but there is a significantly large group in positions of influence, both politically and in the media, who are more invested in keeping us divided and working at cross-purposes, than united and working to make things better. I'll be kind and say that some of them may not realize that they are being encouraged to do this to serve someone else's ends--but their work is still not done for good ends.

Yes, it is depressing. Because there's nothing like seeing someone piss away a chance to get better, whether it's staying in a rotten relationship, failing to break a bad habit, or screwing up the country because the effort to think and act more effectively is too much work, and not enough fun, to get you down.

I don't know what it will take, but I've felt the same thing.

I actually got angry at my mother last week when she told me about a friend of hers that went to Houston to volunteer and then left because 'those people weren't grateful.' She told me he said that there were piles of used clothing they could choose from and some got upset and said they wanted new clothing, and he got disgusted.

Don't know about you, but if I had lost everything, I'd be disheartened digging through someone else's cast-offs for something to wear, too.

I never met the man, but living in DC, I've heard a lot about Mitch Snyder, an activist for the homeless who died a few years ago. I remember being told about a meeting where a volunteer stood up and quit, saying in effect, the same thing - those people aren't grateful. Mitch asked him who he was going down to the shelter to serve - the homeless, or himself? Because if it was all about making him feel better about himself, they didn't want him anyway. But I'm afraid that's were people come from in this.

As Albert, Death's assistant, said in Hogfather:

"Charity ain't givin' people what you wants to give 'em. It's givin' 'em what they need to get."

Though, as the universe is fond of pointing out, what you need isn't necessarily what you want.

Dunno. Katrina made me more distrustful of government than ever. I was particularly struck by the story I read written by a journalist stuck in New Orleans. Along with other survivors, they evacuated downtown at gunpoint, then were told to go across a bridge to get out of the endangered area, where they were turned back at gunpoint by the National Guard and left squatting in the mud in the middle of the whole situation. Whereas, people who held tight in the French quarter were fine. God only know what's true, but I find it hard to blame those who didn't evacuate given what happened to those who tried to. I'd like to see a class action suit against the government here.

I read an article in the newspaper a few days ago that hits on this, too. It said that it's much easier to get donations and charity for people who seem to be innocent victims. The example that they used was that much more money is donated to breast cancer research than lung cancer research, even though more people die from lung cancer. The difference is that 85% of lung cancer victims are smokers - so in effect, they brought it on themselves. People are much less likely to help when it seems it's a clear cause and effect.

Now when we see the destruction wrought by Katrina, I think there's a few things that go on. First, there's an immediate desire to help. Like Camwyn said, you feel impotent, and that's frustrating - so you give money, you do what you can. But the pictures, the stories, they don't stop. They're damn bothersome, in fact, and start chipping at your conscience. Did I do enough? Can I help more? But that slams up against paying bills and wanting to go on vacation and getting a new pair of shoes for yourself, and so justification sets in. And the best way to justify not doing more is to make the tragedy the victim's fault. That way, it was their responsibility. They should have gotten out. They shouldn't have lived in a flood plain... whatever.
It makes it easier to keep living your life the way you live it.

You see, that's why I like you. You're an optimist. You still hope.