I've replaced yesterday's posting on Katrina with this. I wrote the last piece on Wednesday night, slept on it, decided the humor was appropriate on Thursday morning, posted it to the web, proceeded to feel more and more guilty on Thursday as I read one tragic article after another, came home from work, watched more news footage on TV, and quickly decided that I needed to remove it. Even though I had toned it down in the morning before I posted it, the whole piece added up to taking this disaster lightly. That's what was gnawing at me on Thursday, and I'm trying to correct that mistake now.
I realized something else during the day on Thursday. I had written, "There's not much to say that hasn't already been said or thought by everyone." I was basing this comment on a few web postings I had read and what I was hearing on cable news. After thinking about this further, I realize that the truth is: I didn't know what to say. And I didn't know what to say because I didn't know what to think.
I had several feelings upon hearing about the hurricane and the ensuing chaos. They occurred to me more or less in this order, and the ideas were not nearly as clearly formed as I'm trying to make them now:
The first is that people are responsible for themselves and their homes, and it's their responsibility to know the hazards of where they live.
The second thought was that it's sad and incredible the degree to which people have been educated to rely on others to "do something" when they are most in need of using their own minds to make difficult choices. The anger that some people were displaying at no one in particular was astounding to me, and drastically different from what I would have expected to see: something closer to sadness.
But (and here's where the guilt really started kicking in), would I have possibly have prepared sufficiently for this hurricane, if I lived in the area? Would I have lived there in the first place? It was completely plausible that I could have lived there, maybe aware that the city was below sea level, but hoping the levees would protect me. You could argue whether the people who remained in the city at the time of the flooding should have heeded the warnings, but can you really blame them for living there in the first place? I can't. So the destruction of their homes was, what many people other than me realized right away, clearly a tragic accident.
Looking at the facts, it does seem that the danger New Orleans faced from a Category 5 hurricane was known:
"After Betsy these levies were designed for a Category 3," said Sheriff Jeff Hingle of Placquemines Parish, just southeast of New Orleans. "You're now looking at a Category 5. You're looking at a storm that is as strong as Camille was, but bigger than Betsy was size-wise. These levies will not hold the water back. So we're urging people to leave. You're looking at these levies having 10 feet of water over the top of them easily."
If you lived in New Orleans, it was your responsibility to know this. But there's a difference between knowing you should heed the warnings and evacuate the city on the one hand, and taking a chance by having lived there on the other. Perhaps it never was the safest area to live, but there are dangers everywhere. I, for example, continue to commute via the Lincoln Tunnel and to work in Manhattan. There might as well be a bull's eye on New York, but I have no intentions of leaving. If and when the next terrorist attack happens here (I'm more inclined to say "when"), I may very well be affected by it, if not killed. Nevertheless, I'm staying. I have weighed the pros and cons, and decided I do not want to lose what I have here for the benefit of 100% security (which doesn't exist). I am sure that many of the people on the Gulf Coast had similar thoughts.
Another thing I realized about my posting from Thursday is that I commented on the difficulty of reaching the hurricane victims for the purpose of offering them one's home. I had tried Craig's List to see if anyone had posted requests for housing, perhaps someone who was stuck in NYC and couldn't go back home. I didn't see any. Although I spent some time looking, I pretty much gave up and went back to writing about how I didn't find anything. This led to the impression that I was treating the event as just fodder for comedy.
There are aspects of the hurricane, which I wrote about originally, that I still think are fodder for comedy. For example, I still think that if this hurricane had a male name, every Kelvin, Kieran, or Kendrick in Baton Rouge would be getting repeated shots to the head every time he said hello to somebody. I'm confident that a woman named Katrina would be getting gentle laughter. A guy would be getting a hospital bed. Nobody would trust a guy calling himself the name of a major hurricane.
I also think it was worth rementioning that my grandmother had played a lot of nickel slots on those Biloxi casino river boats. And I still wonder how many of her nickels the looters made off with. Incidentally, I never did learn why I could never get any soul food in Ocean Springs. That was always a bummer.
Finally, I wonder how many TV news producers are seriously worried that their slick September 11 specials might be cancelled due to hurricane coverage.
Now that I got that out of my system, let me get back to the part about my half-assed attempt to help. I still think that money is not what the hurricane victims need in the short term. They need to be rescued from their homes, then they need food, water, and most of all, somewhere to live. The upcoming 18 musical telethons will be put on primarily so musicians and audience members can feel like they're "doing something" while Red Cross and other volunteers do the actual work. We have the money in this country (and not surprisingly, the Senate just approved $10.5 billion in aid), but how to deal with the destroyed homes in the short term is another story.
I looked through Craig's List again today. This time, I found a link to a site that solved the problem I encountered yesterday. It's a website which was created by some businessmen in Baton Rouge, called Operation: Share Your Home. As far as I can tell, the site looks legit. The goal of the people who run it is to get offers of housing directly to the people who need them. I checked out the whois listing for their URL, and the addresses and other contact info also look legit.
If you have some space in your home, and the way I see it, have a home that's accessible via a Greyhound bus, then it may be a good idea to offer your home to the Hurricane Katrina victims. I'll let you know if anyone takes me up on my offer.
