New Orleans has become the metonym for the whole the Gulf Coast stomped so thoroughly out of sight by this goddess. And she was a goddess. She revealed our fecklessness, our disinterest, our happy ignorance, and punished mostly those who benefited from this civil neglect with her rage at our collective lunacy.
I speak metaphorically, and seriously.
Marcellus Andrews said, rightly, on NPR last night that Katrina's aftermath exposes the iniquities of our present civil-economic attitude. We don't like taxes. And worse, we misappropriate them. Taxes are to serve the public, to purchace goods and services that none of us can afford individually (or that the individuals who could will not purchase for the rest of us): levees, dams, coastal protetive measures against storm surge, roads, bridges, schools, teachers, hospitals, doctors, evacuation proceedures and equipment, ... you are invited to complete this list, but I add, housing for people violently expelled from their homes by misfortune and who cannot now afford to move back thanks to the "invisible hand" of the free market and laissez faire economics. Andrews argues that our taxes are meant to support a civil society, and he's rights, and that our refusal to contribute to our collective well-being, and I mean COLLECTIVE as in not just the people like-me or near-me or whom-I-like, this refusal is shameful, sinful, and an abomination (my words). And he's right. Chris Rose's 1 Dead in Attic chronicles just how right Andrews is.
Katrina, like every instance of Kali's cleansing wrath, took years to create. Years of neglect, gentile ignorance, a simple and clear refusal to recongnize, honor, and support the human dignity of each our sibling humans. In short, an imperialist hangover in basic attitudes.
Instead of support for the public, taxes provide support to coporate citizens that do not need the support nearly so much as those living in the misery tucked into the corners of our civil closets, and which coporate citizens do not behave like citizens at all. Kali-Katrina is telling us that this cultural value is no longer acceptable.
There are not buckets but massive dump trucks of money in the US. There is no shortage of our famous and not-mythical ingenuity, either. More of both keep coming out of economic aquifers and finding "purpose" in purposeless endeavors both at home and abroad. This is our collective iniquity.
We have no enemy, no enemy anywhere on this earth, more effective in the process of our destruction or crippling than ourselves, our selfishness, our comfortable ignorance, our support of descision makers who have consistently decided against our best and most important because most basic interests.
Our power, our riches, our absolutely miraculous American ability to accomplish nearly anything we can imagine has been directed away from social justice and the support of civil society. The people of the Gulf Coast, and indeed in many parts of the world, are paying the price. And the price can, and will be, visited upon us.
The visitations will be difficult to detect, oblique in thier avatar's reference as a Cat5 hurricane, an earth quake in the New Madrid, a uranium mine bleeding poision into the ground water on the reservation, a small and angry band of suicidal men.
A week from now last year, Karen and I and her sister were at Reunion Arena. Diana had collected $3000 dollars from her neighbors, and we went shopping: for strollers, for training bras and grown up bras, for sanitary napkins, towels, shoes, toys for the kids, hand sanitzer, toothbrushes and paste, and so on, all from dollar stores so we could get as much as possible, and suitcases from Target so people could carry their things. And Diana brought box after box of donated clothes. We gave it all away. It didn't take long for the tables with the three nice white ladies to get some word of mouth. The point of this is this: These were sweet, kind, gentle, totally shellshocked and embarassed people. Embarassed to need help so very badly and to be so grateful for it. Their whole ability to provide for themselves stripped, drowned in the waters of the Ponchatrain. These were gracious and clever people who let the life come back into their eyes sometimes as they talked with us. These were people from the 9th Ward and other of the poorer regions of the coast. These were people gentle with their children, inquisitive, giving to each other, pulling together to help each other as they could. And simply blown out of their lives. Rendered helpless and dependent by our fecklessness and disinterest as a nation.
No one says a word against these people around me.
To the people of the Gulf Coast, may you return home soon, may you return home with the full force of the American imagination and economy in a great storm surge of love and justice.
Which, will only happen when we collectively learn this collective lesson. FEMA? We don't need FEMA. We need Americans who have houses making demands on their state and federal governments w/r/t their appropriation of OUR MONEY. Want a Culture of Life? Let's took to the living, for the lesson is this: Yes, I am my brother's keeper.
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