In a disaster like the 1906 earthquake, there was a great deal for people to do as soon as the shaking was over—rescuing, fighting fire, building temporary shelters and then those convivial community kitchens. Some felt more powerful as they took action, formed community, made decisions, functioned in the absence of the usual systems. That sense of agency was not so widespread in Katrina. The disaster did bring together many who stayed in the city. But most people evacuated, believing they would be gone a few days but then found themselves in exile. Staying in the city meant being utterly overwhelmed by the scale of the catastrophe, stranded by the water and seeing the authorities go berserk. Many felt helpless, even if they were not stuck in one of the terrible public shelters, and when they were evacuated, they were often put on buses and planes without being allowed to choose or even know their destination. Those who could evacuate under their own means controlled their destiny—where they went and when they returned. Those who couldn’t didn’t. Evacuees were often received kindly after their city was wrecked, but their few days away stretched into weeks and months. They were estranged, adrift, uprooted, recipients of charity more than members of a community of mutual aid. Organizing anything amid that diaspora was difficult, and so was staving off despair.
Earthquakes and fires are comparatively clean disasters; the flood of New Orleans left behind silt, mud, debris, and, indoors, toxic mold, while the unexpectedly long evacuation left food to rot in tens of thousands of refrigerators; bodies decaying in flooded homes; dead animals among the fallen trees and debris; contaminants and toxins carried by water that settled in odd places; a huge oil spill in St. Bernard Parish; a filthy, stinking, soggy mess dismaying to those who came back.
The most optimistic of all disaster scholars, Charles Fritz, had ascribed his positive disaster experiences only to those who are “permitted to interact freely and to make an unimpeded social adjustment.” This was hardly what happened in the first days and weeks of Katrina, when many felt abandoned, criminalized, imprisoned, cast out, and then like recipients of charity—or hate. Many are still displaced years after the storm—the calculus is, “If you couldn’t afford to evacuate, you probably can’t afford to come back”—and rental housing in particular has evaporated from the city. The scale of the devastation and loss meant that mutual aid was not enough. Enormous amounts of assistance from outside were required, and they came in bureaucratically choked dribbles from government agencies and in unstinting waves from the huge quantity of volunteers who came from around the country to rebuild New Orleans, tens and then hundreds of thousands. Eventually a handful of visionary projects would be launched in New Orleans, bringing real if limited benefits to a troubled place.
Like the people in Mexico City in 1985, the people of New Orleans won a lot of battles. The early plan to just raze the low-lying areas that were often also the low-income areas was killed off by people like Pam Dashiell, and citizen pressure forced the city government to recommit money to rebuilding some of those neighborhoods. ACORN, the group that works on housing issues with poor communities around the country, is head-quartered in New Orleans, and Wade Rathke, its founding director, told me, “Even if you take some of the most aggressive plans—to take away fiscal ability and land control from local officials—they didn’t succeed.” Public housing was largely razed, though some affordable housing was to be built on some of the sites—and Rathke points out that “it’s impossible for me to pretend that we weren’t losing it in city after city for twenty years. To win in New Orleans would have been to reverse what we’ve been losing everywhere else.” He was not happy about the hundred thousand people who hadn’t come back three years later, but he noted that the labor scarcity had meant a rise in wages for a lot of the city’s service economy and other jobs and a rise in employment levels in a city that had long been hemorrhaging work. There were victories and improvements. But a lot of people were still uprooted and suffering. Rents were up, essential services—hospitals, day care—were greatly reduced, the homeless population doubled, and by the third anniversary of the disaster, the city had 71,657 vacant, ruined, and uninhabited houses. Many were permanently exiled, stranded in toxic trailers in remote locations, homeless, or overwhelmed by the task of trying to return. (The kind of bureaucracy that strangled official response is demonstrated by the rule that forbade FEMA to spend disaster-relief money on permanent structures; the toxic $70,000 trailers consumed money that in a less inflexible system could’ve been used for rebuilding or for sturdier, saner shelters.)
The commitment was extraordinary. When I first visited the Lower Ninth, six months after Katrina, it was eerily abandoned. No one lived there, and there were no streetlights. The storm seemed to have just happened. Cars were still tossed over fences, houses sat in the middle of streets, other houses existed only as splintered wreckage, and a lot of the street signs that weren’t missing were homemade. Those signs said a lot about the people who’d come back in advance of their own government to try to bring the Lower Ninth back to life. Every time I returned, the place was different—wreckage disappeared, signs appeared, houses were reclaimed, yards mowed from the six-foot-high weeds that had sprung up, and more and more signs of life were apparent—but like so many other neighborhoods, it was still missing a huge portion of its people and its future remained utterly uncertain.
Waves of volunteers arrived in the city, many of them focusing on gutting houses and beginning the long, hard journey toward rebuilding a habitable city. Others provided food, counseling, medical care, and more. National organizations such as Habitat for Humanity and the Red Cross showed up to fufill their mandate. Existing local organizations shifted their purpose or intensified their mission, as did the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association and many churches. Churches from around the country sent delegations down to do a week’s work on a project; for many it was a profound experience. For a few years, thousands of college students went to rebuild New Orleans as an alternative spring break. New local organizations arose, from the radical People’s Hurricane Relief Fund to the upper-class Women of the Storm, who used their access to bring in politicians to see the devastation firsthand. Counterculture groups played an important role, from descendants of the black power movement to hordes of young white anarchists. An extraordinary amount of love and work went into the effort to revive a city that had been pronounced dead shortly after August 29, 2005.
BELOVED COMMUNITY
Pitching a Tent
Thanks to Katrina, the Bush administration lost its mandate of heaven. Perhaps the president and his team should have lost it in the chaos of September 11, 2001, but they cannily framed that situation in a way that led to a surge of patriotic fear and deference and defined the administration as decisive, powerful, unquestionable—until the summer of 2005. Only then did the media and public begin to criticize the administration with the fearlessness that should be part of every era, every democracy. Many reporters standing in the ruins of the Gulf voiced unscripted outrage over the incompetence, callousness, and cluelessness of the federal government during the catastrophe. After Katrina, people who had been afraid to criticize the administration were emboldened to do so. It changed the tone nationwide, and Bush soon became the most unpopular president in American history.
On September 1, the president said, “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.” The media later obtained videotape of him being warned of that possibility on August 28. The public too began to speak out more fearlessly that summer. Poverty and race became issues again. MSNBC commentator Keith Olbermann was so outraged by Katrina that on September 5, 2005, he launched into a furious, widely circulated tirade against the Bush administration, the beginning of his Special Comments that were routinely the most hostile critique of the president in the mainstream media and one of the most noted. “It wasn’t Iraq that did George Bush in—it was the weather,” he said in 2007. Bush’s own pollster, Matthew Dowd, said later, “Katrina to me was the tipping point. The president broke h
is bond with the public. . . . I knew when Katrina—I was like, man, you know, this is it, man. We’re done.” By then a liberal black man with a background in community organizing had become a serious contender to succeed that president in the 2008 election—an unimaginable possibility not long before; and another Democratic contender for the White House launched his campaign in New Orleans and made poverty its central issue. The nation shifted, not only from deference to the president but from fealty to the politics of the far right, and Katrina was the turning point.
Bush had been on a five-week vacation at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, when the hurricane hit, and he waited a few days before deciding to return to work in the nation’s capital. On the way, he had Air Force One swing low over New Orleans. Being photographed sitting comfortably looking out an airplane window at a city in which people were still stranded did not help his image. His vacation had been disrupted already, though. Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq a year earlier, had camped outside the presidential expanse to demand that Bush meet with her. Harrowed by grief at her son’s death, she tried to make sense of it by demanding the president tell her “for what noble cause did my son die?” She thus became a major voice in the antiwar movement, a surprising role for a suburban mother of three and devout Catholic who had hitherto led a quiet life, surprising most of all to her.
At that moment in August of 2005, the rangy blond mom with her unstudied, heartfelt, and sometimes outrageous speech became the narrow point of a wedge opening up room to debate the war. She set up a tent in a ditch by the road to the presidential ranch in Crawford on August 6, and supporters began to gather, bringing their own tents and vehicles and building an impromptu village around what began as a small vigil. They named it Camp Casey, after her dead son whose image was everywhere. During a slow news month, this standoff between a bereaved mother sitting at the gates and a president who wouldn’t show his face became a huge story. Her son’s death had been her disaster; that she made something remarkable of her response to it was clearly her salvation.
I stopped by Camp Casey the day that Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf and found a big camp and an extraordinary community akin in many ways to disaster communities. The rolling green landscape studded with small groves of oak trees was beautiful. The sky was strange, huge white clouds swelling overhead, the air stifling. A field of crosses, one for each American soldier dead in the war, stood in front of the huge shade tent with open sides and in which all the meetings, meals, and conversations were held. Someone had come the day before and decorated the crosses with roses of all colors that were wilting in the steamy air. Retired colonel Ann Wright—the career diplomat who resigned on March 19, 2003, the day the U.S. war against Iraq began—strode around making sure everything was going well at the camp. Tough, sweet, and enormously competent, she had directed the evacuation of the U.S. presence in Sierra Leone when that nation erupted in conflict and helped establish the embassy in Afghanistan in 2001. She radiated the same joy many others there did: that this was exactly the meaningful work they had always wanted, and the heat and disarray and discomfort mattered not at all compared to this great sense of arrival. Everywhere people were having the public conversation about politics and values a lot of us dream about the rest of the time, average-looking people of all ages from all over the country, particularly the heartland.
I met a woman who lost her teaching job in Indiana for saying something against the war to elementary-school kids and who was terribly worried about her navy son; a twenty-five-year-old from Kansas City, Missouri, on his honeymoon with a wife who pushed his wheelchair everywhere, because an explosion in Iraq had paralyzed him; an old man from Slater, Missouri, who had been in the marines from 1957 to 1963 and had been sleeping in his Ford pickup with 300,000 miles on the odometer during the encampment; four elders from the American Indian Movement, who said what everyone said, “I heard about it and I had to come.” The dozen or so clean-cut, serious young veterans of the unfinished war were restless that day, worried that much of the Louisiana National Guard and its equipment was stationed in Iraq when their state needed them desperately. Immediately afterward, the camp broke up, and the group Veterans for Peace drove busloads of supplies to the Gulf, becoming one of the earliest relief efforts to arrive, responding directly from outside the gates of the president’s vacation home while inside everything was stalled and confused.
Sheehan herself moved through the camp giving interviews, hugging veterans, receiving gifts, seemingly inexhaustible, as though grief had hollowed out all usual needs and left her nothing but a purity of purpose. She said to me at the end of that day, August 29, “This is the most amazing thing that has ever happened to me and probably that ever will. I don’t even think I would even want anything more amazing to happen to me.”
Reconciliations
Early in his work with the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. began to talk about the “beloved community.” The movement was against discrimination, segregation, and other manifestations of racism. In King’s eyes, it was not only against but also for—for a larger vision, a utopian ideal of fellowship, justice, and peace. Every activist movement begins by uniting its participants in important ways, giving them a sense of purpose drawn from the wrongs they seek to right and the shared vision of a better world. In 1957, King wrote that the ultimate aim of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a key player in the movement, was “to foster and create the ‘beloved community’ in America where brotherhood is a reality. . . . Our ultimate goal is genuine inter-group and interpersonal living—integration.” Integration was no longer merely a practical matter of buses, schools, lunch counters, and workplaces. It was a metaphysic of solidarity and affinity, a condition of hearts rather than laws and facilities. The same year he declared that the nonviolent activist in this movement “realizes that noncooperation and boycotts are not ends themselves. . . . The end is redemption and reconciliation. The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community.” Of course that was a movement that came out of the black churches of the South, and so it was religious from its roots on up. Other groups took up the term, notably the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that organized Freedom Summer and introduced ideas about participatory democracy rather than charismatic leadership to the activists of the 1960s.
What begins as opposition coalesces again and again into social invention, a revolution of everyday life rather than a revolt against the system. Sometimes it leads to the kind of utopian community that withdraws from the larger society; sometimes, particularly in recent decades, it has generated small alternatives—cooperatives, organic farms, health-care projects, festivals—that became integral parts of this society. One of the fundamental questions of revolution is whether a change at the level of institutions and systemic power is enough or whether the goal is to change hearts, minds, and acts of everyday life. Someone like King wanted both: the end of the official apartheid and discrimination in the United States and the transformation of spirit and imagination in each and every citizen.
When we talk of social change, we talk of movements, a word that suggests vast groups of people walking together, leaving behind one way and traveling toward another. But what exists between these people is not movement but a settling in together that is the beginnings of community (though in other cases, notably that of the civil rights movement, a community quite literally got up and began moving, through streets, across states, into diners and voting places). This is one of the major rewards of activism—a new community offering a new sense of shared purpose and belonging, honoring the principles for which it fights, the conditions so palpable among the people at Camp Casey that August. Again and again, antiwar, environmental, social justice, human rights, and other movements generate new communities, often transcending old divides, and in the process bringing something of that urgency, purposefulness, suspension of everyday concerns, fellowship, and social joy also found in disaster. This, of course, is n
ot always what happens: dysfunctional organizations with bad internal dynamics are legion, but much of the activism of the 1980s in particular focused on cleaning up the process—working toward egalitarianism, nondiscrimination, and accountability from the inside out. The affinities with disaster communities are obvious: activist communities come into being in response to what is perceived as a disaster—discrimination, destruction, deprivation—and sometimes generate a moment or fragment of a better world. As Temma Kaplan, a New Yorker who had been part of that movement in the American South, said, “For a short time, during the first few days after 9/11 I felt that Beloved Community that we talked about in the Civil Rights Movement.”
After Katrina, existing communities had been devastated, both by the physical damage that scattered residents to the corners of the country and by the traumas of the social and political catastrophes. The volunteers who came from outside the area did something to restore those existing communities and in the course of doing so generated an ephemeral series of communities all their own. Religious groups played a huge role in the resurrection of New Orleans. In terms of sheer might, Catholic Charities and the Methodist Church did the most. (A Mennonite call to retired RV owners to congregate in the Gulf listed among the benefits of volunteering, “Becoming the ‘hands and feet’ of Jesus offers a very rewarding retirement activity; fellowship with other persons of a like mind as you become part of a team; bring back hope to those who have lost it; enjoy social times, potlucks, eating out together, accepting local invitations for meals.” Though the Mennonites I saw were mostly in their prime and fiercely good as construction crews.) The tight-knit community around Mary Queen of Vietnam Church in New Orleans East organized the congregation whose early return and effective mutual aid made it possible for others in the Vietnamese American community to return as well.
A Paradise Built in Hell Page 34
