Is it just me? ...... As you watch the flooding in the Midwest , have you noticed that there are no farmers running around with stolen plasma TVs or holding stolen liquor over their heads. There's no looting or yelling "Where's Bush?", "Where's FEMA?, Where's my check?", or "Why isn't the Gov't out here saving me and my farm?"Likewise, I've also noticed there are no reports of any other country coming to help or sending aid. Is that interesting, or WHAT???!!!!
To which I responded with this (being one to, you know, hold my tongue):
Dear {Cousin},
So, Mom showed me this email, and asked, "Yeh, isn't that interesting?" I'm taken aback by the implication you make here, {Cousin}. That she accepted. She got her earful, and I think it worth sharing. You imply that those nice white people in the Midwest behave well, and those not-so-nice black people NO behave badly. Because I hope I'm reading you incorrectly. You don't strike me as the type to accept mythology, whether created by the news or not; nor as the type to just let the mythology slot into place and stay there. The impression you seem to have is easy to get, and it's partly right, and it's partly wrong. And it just happens to have struck a nerve with me. And, like others in our clan, I just have a really hard time not saying what I have to say. So, if I read you wrongly, please forgive me.
Mostly due to differences in the situation of the two floods, and the reporting on them, you get to notice this difference in behavior. I've kept up with New Orleans because I have connections to that amazing, gritty, graceful, dangerous, joyful town. Friends live or lived there, and I've spent time in many of its wards and quarters. I know that place pretty well for someone who doesn't live there. I still hope to live there for some part of my life. There is no place like it.
The floods in the Midwest affected people spread over a large area. This is farmland, not a dense urban situation like New Orleans. And the city/country context matters in the case of human behavior under duress. The people of the Midwest, most of them, had time to gather some belongings and evacuate. Floods in the Midwest, while devastating to communities and lives, move slowly, take weeks to unfold. You can get ready, sort of, for a Midwest flood. You can prepare to help you neighbors. You don't need soldiers from Mexico backing up your National Guard because the flood didn't happen in a matter of hours. The flood in New Orleans happened in a matter of hours. The morning after the hurricane, I saw a friend's house on the news, when they were still showing pictures how well things were going, that the levee which holds back a lake 10 miles wide (the Pochatrain), was still holding. He lived just outside the French Quarter on Burgundy Street. By that evening, his house was in five feet of water. There was precious little time to do anything but try to save your own butt and that of your family. This is NO, neighborly behavior is the rule, tradition, rich or poor, all over the city of looking after each other. The fact that that broke down tells you how scared and panicked people were.
Most of the people who did not evacuate NO before Katrina simply could not do so. Had no car, or not enough room in a car for the kids and grandma, etc., and stayed in an attempt to care for family. Or, as many do when they panic, followed the misguided notion that they might be able to save their house, get the furniture upstairs, that someone would come help. They did not know how bad it would get in the course in the one morning. This according to almost every news report during, and especially in the weeks after the storm. Basically, no National Guard came to drive the empty, idle, city school buses and get people out while they could. And there are about six Army and National Guard bases within 10 hours of NO. Remember those people, some in hospital beds, stuck on the bridge? They were there for three days. Any Army helicopter could have been there in mere hours and lifted them out. But it was not ordered, and did not happen. There were dead bodies, hundreds, floating the streets. What might that, I wonder, do to my head? Knowing that my military can get soldiers into and out of combat zones, but can't get me off a bridge or a roof, can't drop some food and water supplies outside the arena. Really, just did not do so. Yep, I would be mad as hell too, I would be demanding my fair share and rights as an American too. I might be looting, depends. I'm not excusing, I'm explaing that there's more at work here than the "sense of entitlement" you imply in your email.
And, let's not talk about the infrastructure. Those levees in NO had been known, reported, monies requested from the state and Fed to strengthen them, for a decade. Nothing. And the levees in the Midwest: equally criminal. It was known that likely one more big flood would breach them. But, what have we, as a nation, done in the last 15 years to protect our precious farmland, its farmers and residents, and prevent billions of dollars in losses and more increases in the price of food (that is, passing the buck to the people again, just without actual taxes, this is just a market issue). Nothing. And, I've read reports recently that some of the contractors rebuilding the NO levees are filling them with, are you ready?, newspaper. Which is not notorious for its resistance to pressure when wet. So, how often do we, as a nation, have to abandon people before we get done abandoning them?
Remember the nursing home in New Orleans? The owner/managers abandoned it and left something like 12 people in their beds to drown and die. Old, infirm, people, the one's good people are supposed to save first. Treated like furniture. Those owners, who didn't cry out for FEMA, were jailed for life a year later, for murder. Not looting, murder. Those were middle class people who let the poor and vulernable, whom they knew, just die.
Or that broken man whose children were ripped away from his arms in the flood? All he wanted was to find them. Trying to get some help from anyone to find them. That did not happen to one man. That happened to a lot of families. For weeks and months, Red Cross and other were trying to help thousands people find family. Or, locate the dead. So, your home is gone, you've survived the arena, and now you can't find your cousin who used to live down the street. This is not happening the Midwest. This level of personal heartbreak is not happening here.
Many in the Midwest are in the same end result as many of the people in New Orleans. Poor people live near rivers because the land and home prices are affordable to them. Land on a river, a house near a river, the poor live there because that's what they can afford. They didn't have money for flood insurance, were under the impression that faulty levees would hold, and now have lost, some permanently, everything. Though, reports say that FEMA is on the scene, and will be helping the under- or uninsured. And these are people who are used to living on the rivers, they expect this kind of trouble from time to time. No one in the Midwest has been trapped in a sports arena for five days without shower, food, or water or protection. And unspeakable things happened in that arena. People under that much stress don't behave well. People in NO are not used to dealing with floods of that kind, and not that fast, and not right after a major huriane which knocks out the city's pumping system, which dumps into the lake that was flooding into the city through the levee that gave out.
In the Midwest, FEMA and the National Guard showed up in time. The trailors are not sitting idle in Arkansas while people are wondering where they're going to live while they try to rebuild a life. The quiet people of the Midwest will have shelter, they don't even have to ask.
There were reports locally here in the Midwest of business owners being worried about looting, and glad that the Guard was on the scene to help with sandbags and crime prevention. Because without them, those home and business owners would not have had protection. But, there was only one report of that concern, not two days of pictures (the same pictures, of two incidents) of looting: image of the blacks taking TVs, the whites taking water out of a grocery store. Looting by people trapped in a flooded city, with no support, who were hungry. So, it's easy to get the impression that nice people in the Midwest just up and behave better than those other people in that bad 'hood in that city. Really, it's very easy. And partly just wrong.
Like the people in the flooded Midwest, the people of the 9th ward were poor and working people. Most of them lived in that ward all their lives, for generations, were homeowners (who, by the way, still owe on homes that cannot be rebuilt because the bank gets the insurance and FEMA money before the owner, so the houses rot, get condemmned, and then the city tracks the owners down and fines them for letting the property fall apart, razes it, and builds a nice new condo for the rich who will move in now -- most of these people will never, ever, go home, they are effectively, exiles. This is not being reported MSNBC and similar.). These looters and screamers you mention used to clean the hotels tourists stay in while they party in the Quarter, they delivered ice for our drinks, they bartended, they cooked in the city's famous restaurants, they tought in the schools, they ran stores, they worked retail, they work. Many were lower middle class and poorer too -- just poor enough to be vunerable to a disaster of this kind. Some, yes, were gansters, and criminals, and believe me, we have that in our nice little farming communities too, where in Illinois and Missouri the number one crime problem is methamphetamine, its making, its dealing, its personal and social effects equal to that of crack cocaine, and it's huge -- though not as reported on as crime in the cities, mostly for reasons of geography and the location of most local news outlets, the big cities they cover. Unlike the Midwest, NO had just been hit by category 5 hurricane. No electricity, no running water, no basic civilization, no nothing.
As far as race is concerned: white people were looting in NO too. Black and white, when the looting was over most of what was missing was diapers, food, water. Nobody was helping them, so they helped themselves. Not TVs, plasma or otherwise. The jail in NO was breached, many actual criminals escaped into the general population... you can imagine how enjoyable that was for the good people of NO. On top of the bodies floating in the streets, on top of being left to cope for five days before any government agency sprang into action, criminals getting a holiday.
The crime in the city since? Who left? The good people who could, before or after the storm. Who stayed? Those strong and mean or stuck there enough to stay. It's social darwinism in its worst incarnation.
While the president told his friend Brownie he was doing a good job, and then assured Senator Frist that his plantation house on the coast of Mississippi would be rebuilt. Yeh, there's a president on the side of the people. I'm sorry, but that symbolism (nor the actuality for that matter) just is not right.
I met these people, {Cousin}. When busses of them arrived in Dallas to stay in our arena for a while before being settled into living in Dallas, Karen, her sister (who flew in from CA) and I took up collections of money, thousands of dollars, and went shopping, for two nights, and hauled everything to the area. We gave away babystrollers to mother's who didn't have them, bras to women and teen aged girls, underware, shirts and pants, diapers, toothpaste and brushes, shampoo, some toys for little kids, and luggage for families that came by. These people were utterly shell shocked, and totally, I mean godblessing us all over the place, that these three women would just up and pull together their own little red cross for them. And they were deeply embarassed to be in such need. My friend Amy, a pedicurist, tended to people's feet. They were sore, or injured and infected by the debris and the sewage in the water. She would help the injury cases to the Red Cross after cleaning them up. Folks whose feet were just sore from all that standing and stress, she massaged. They thought it was the best thing ever. A tiny reminder of their humanity in all this sadness they were living. I handed a kid a little toy dinosaur from the dollar store, and you'd have thought I was Santa Claus. I gave out a lot of toys and underward, and seriously, I was Father Christmas. His mother gathered a few things they needed. No one took more than they needed, and mostly they were grateful for being treated with some dignity now theirs had been stripped from them. It was hot in Dallas that weekend, in the 102 range, but at least this arena was air conditioned, the lights and bathrooms worked. There were cops around. Karen and us, we hung out under the parking lot, next to the donated clothing people were picking through, which was lying on the ground, just to get a couple changes of clothes. Even where no one was looking, I watched people take a few donations and deliberately leave stuff that fit them because someone else might need it. These people who had, literally, nothing but the dirty clothes on their back. We drank a lot of water. We ate with these folks in the food line set up by a local restaurant owner, who had the the good sense to make some gumbo. Easy to serve, loaded with nutrition, a gesture of understanding for what these folks were missing. And he did not skimp on the ingredients. It was good food. I have no idea what it cost him, but he fed many hundreds of people twice a day for three or four days. Other restaurants had done the same at other locations around the arena. We accepted a lot of thanks for what was just the right thing to do.
They were just people. Hurt, dispossessed, and assured that they weren't worth saving. Not quickly enough.
So, no, people in the Midwest are not looting and screaming. Mostly because they are in small towns where the social dynamic is different from the city, and because they are not being left to die for almost a week. The madness in NO set in over time, it didn't happen right away. It happened after it became clear that help was not on the way, not in time.
So, be careful, OK?, let's not let the way the news frames a story determine what we think of people. Because that story is already an interpretation, picking and choosing the facts we report is already interpretation. We're not reading reports on the rates of drug abuse, child abuse, spousal abuse, teen pregnancy, alcoholism in small town America, but the stats show it tracks right along with the big, bad, cities. Is worse in some cases because there's so little other entertainment. And their schools, well, those are not great either. The mainstream press does not report on this aspect of life in small town America. They leave intact that notion that everyone in the small town is decent and just and self-reliant. Myths are very dangerous. They let people suffer, in the city and in the country. We, who have homes, and comfort, should be very careful of the myths we accept. Frankly, if I'd been stuck in NO, I would have been screaming too.
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