Wednesday, September 07, 2005
My Thoughts On Katrina
When Hurricane Katrina first announced herself on my television, I didn’t think anything of it. Hurricanes have pummeled Florida for years and more often than not, the media gives it very little attention. Surely, I remember the footage from last summer with residents of local Florida counties crying in front of their destroyed houses. Yet they were isolated incidents on my television and it never occurred to me that I should donate a few dollars or even think about it for longer than the news report.
Why does it take a natural disaster of this magnitude to make us care?
When the residents of Louisiana were told to evacuate, I started to become more interested; applying the situation to my own life just to see how I would have reacted. After a couple minutes of thought, I decided that I would stay put. I would buy some supplies and pray that my cable wouldn’t go out. After all, I’m a NYer and I’ve been through 9/11 first hand. Warnings are merely that: warnings.
As the storm roared over the Gulf Coast, I watched the story unfold before my eyes. It was amazing and scary and I wanted so badly to be there experiencing that meteorological chaos. I imagined myself in my house with boarded up windows, listening to a shitty transistor radio, complaining that we had to play another round of Uno. I would have been in my house after all: the safest place on the planet.
When the rains stopped and the levees broke, I realized that the game I was playing with myself, the game where I’m braver than life, was over. I would have been dead.
Hundreds of people sitting on their roofs’, signs above their heads (“Help us!”) and I began to cry. What was going on? Why were people stranded? That can’t be the tops of houses peeking through the water!
And then it began. A community descended into chaos and I watched in shock, jaw gaped. I began to get up a couple of minutes earlier in order to buy the morning paper. I rode on the subway reading individualized stories – a local aquarium had the roof ripped off and a seal lion was picked up by the wind and slammed into a local building, A man holding on to his wife, on the roof of his house, made the decision to let the water carry her away in order to save his two young children, families separated in order to find a high enough place to sit so that the flood wouldn’t wipe them all away in one big wave. There wasn’t a commute where my eyes weren’t filled with tears.
Terribly, it was only the beginning of this horrible nightmare.
As the days went by, I worked and continued my life as normally as I could. The NY Post always in my bag, I would discover that I had inky, black fingers from constantly pulling it out to read every word. Looting took over and people began to starve. Helplessness was replaced by fear and before that emotion had taken over, a will to survive started to burn. Not necessarily from the water, but from the lack of resources and the surging violence in a world with no laws.
Where was the help? Of course the conditions were impossible to understand, but its 2005 and we can send people to the moon. It would be unfathomable to think that help wasn’t on its way – a convoy of food and water and police - everything the people would need to regain their faith. But the days dragged on and people still sat on their roofs.
With no assistance in sight, people began to get desperate. Looting, killing, raping…nothing was off limits. Fight for your lives, take what you want; there will be no one to stop you, because there is no one to help you.
It’s very easy to lay blame on the president. He’s been under major scrutiny since he ran for re-election. However, whether or not he is a competent president, is not the issue here. The issue is the devastation. The issue is the mental state of these horrified people. The issue is the mourning and acceptance of such a tragic event. We’ll have time to figure out why we can organize an invasion into Iraq in the matter of hours, but we can’t find a way to deliver food or water to New Orleans for days.
Having been in Manhattan on the day of September 11th, I realized even then that my life would forever change. I had experienced panic in a way that I had never imagined and I dealt with a kind of sadness and frustration that was previously foreign to me. Since the first moment I heard that an airplane crashed into the World Trade Center, I have strived to re-discover my innocence and optimism. For a long time, I believed it would come back. I now have something in common with the citizens of Louisiana.
Hurricane Katrina has shown me the ugly side of weather and human nature; I can feel the work I’ve done over the last couple of years fade away, only to be replaced with that same feeling of defeat. If something this catastrophic can happen and if terrorism is breathing down our neck, how can you live in a world where your life is threatened at every corner? Or even worse, how can you live in a world where you have to watch it unfold in front of your eyes?
I’ve learned quite a few lessons over the past week, mostly dealing with the complexity of the human condition. Does it only take 24 hours for our society to fall apart? If anarchy is a sincere force to reckon with, would I be learning how to shoot a gun, rather than trying to get my face on TV? Is it detrimental that I create an evacuation plan of my own and save up cash for this specific reason? Obviously enough, is life so unpredictable that I too will have a comfortable home one day only to eventually cry over the rubble of my existence the next?
It can’t take another tragedy for me to confront the reality of my generation.
And to think…
I fully believed that I would have ridden out the storm with my transistor radio.
When Hurricane Katrina first announced herself on my television, I didn’t think anything of it. Hurricanes have pummeled Florida for years and more often than not, the media gives it very little attention. Surely, I remember the footage from last summer with residents of local Florida counties crying in front of their destroyed houses. Yet they were isolated incidents on my television and it never occurred to me that I should donate a few dollars or even think about it for longer than the news report.
Why does it take a natural disaster of this magnitude to make us care?
When the residents of Louisiana were told to evacuate, I started to become more interested; applying the situation to my own life just to see how I would have reacted. After a couple minutes of thought, I decided that I would stay put. I would buy some supplies and pray that my cable wouldn’t go out. After all, I’m a NYer and I’ve been through 9/11 first hand. Warnings are merely that: warnings.
As the storm roared over the Gulf Coast, I watched the story unfold before my eyes. It was amazing and scary and I wanted so badly to be there experiencing that meteorological chaos. I imagined myself in my house with boarded up windows, listening to a shitty transistor radio, complaining that we had to play another round of Uno. I would have been in my house after all: the safest place on the planet.
When the rains stopped and the levees broke, I realized that the game I was playing with myself, the game where I’m braver than life, was over. I would have been dead.
Hundreds of people sitting on their roofs’, signs above their heads (“Help us!”) and I began to cry. What was going on? Why were people stranded? That can’t be the tops of houses peeking through the water!
And then it began. A community descended into chaos and I watched in shock, jaw gaped. I began to get up a couple of minutes earlier in order to buy the morning paper. I rode on the subway reading individualized stories – a local aquarium had the roof ripped off and a seal lion was picked up by the wind and slammed into a local building, A man holding on to his wife, on the roof of his house, made the decision to let the water carry her away in order to save his two young children, families separated in order to find a high enough place to sit so that the flood wouldn’t wipe them all away in one big wave. There wasn’t a commute where my eyes weren’t filled with tears.
Terribly, it was only the beginning of this horrible nightmare.
As the days went by, I worked and continued my life as normally as I could. The NY Post always in my bag, I would discover that I had inky, black fingers from constantly pulling it out to read every word. Looting took over and people began to starve. Helplessness was replaced by fear and before that emotion had taken over, a will to survive started to burn. Not necessarily from the water, but from the lack of resources and the surging violence in a world with no laws.
Where was the help? Of course the conditions were impossible to understand, but its 2005 and we can send people to the moon. It would be unfathomable to think that help wasn’t on its way – a convoy of food and water and police - everything the people would need to regain their faith. But the days dragged on and people still sat on their roofs.
With no assistance in sight, people began to get desperate. Looting, killing, raping…nothing was off limits. Fight for your lives, take what you want; there will be no one to stop you, because there is no one to help you.
It’s very easy to lay blame on the president. He’s been under major scrutiny since he ran for re-election. However, whether or not he is a competent president, is not the issue here. The issue is the devastation. The issue is the mental state of these horrified people. The issue is the mourning and acceptance of such a tragic event. We’ll have time to figure out why we can organize an invasion into Iraq in the matter of hours, but we can’t find a way to deliver food or water to New Orleans for days.
Having been in Manhattan on the day of September 11th, I realized even then that my life would forever change. I had experienced panic in a way that I had never imagined and I dealt with a kind of sadness and frustration that was previously foreign to me. Since the first moment I heard that an airplane crashed into the World Trade Center, I have strived to re-discover my innocence and optimism. For a long time, I believed it would come back. I now have something in common with the citizens of Louisiana.
Hurricane Katrina has shown me the ugly side of weather and human nature; I can feel the work I’ve done over the last couple of years fade away, only to be replaced with that same feeling of defeat. If something this catastrophic can happen and if terrorism is breathing down our neck, how can you live in a world where your life is threatened at every corner? Or even worse, how can you live in a world where you have to watch it unfold in front of your eyes?
I’ve learned quite a few lessons over the past week, mostly dealing with the complexity of the human condition. Does it only take 24 hours for our society to fall apart? If anarchy is a sincere force to reckon with, would I be learning how to shoot a gun, rather than trying to get my face on TV? Is it detrimental that I create an evacuation plan of my own and save up cash for this specific reason? Obviously enough, is life so unpredictable that I too will have a comfortable home one day only to eventually cry over the rubble of my existence the next?
It can’t take another tragedy for me to confront the reality of my generation.
And to think…
I fully believed that I would have ridden out the storm with my transistor radio.
