Allow me to interrupt this frenzy about gas prices and this furor over immigration, if only for a moment, to remind America that New Orleans is still drowning.
The water that drowned New Orleans was pumped out long ago, but the city still suffocates, it still gasps for breath. It's struggling to save itself, yet this time, the world isn't watching.
Sure, President Bush made his 11th photo-op stop in New Orleans today, and Congress is set to approve billions in relief and levee repairs. Yet eight months after a great American city was destroyed, and just weeks before hurricane season again threatens the Gulf Coast, there is no national urgency, no sense of leadership, and no reminder that the horror of that day may repeat itself again.
Five years after 9/11, I still see those "NEVER FORGET" bumper stickers on the road. September 11th is a date seared into our national consciousness. Yet ask Americans about August 29th, and hardly any I think would remember that date as the day we nearly lost an entire American city forever.
No, there aren't any bumper stickers imploring us to remember the day Mother Nature terrorized us and our government failed to protect us. Personally, I don't need bumper stickers to remember that day. I'll never forget my fellow citizens, standing on the roofs of their house (no longer houses, but too-tiny islands in a brown sea) waiving for helicopters, for life.
I'll never forget that mass of humanity in the Superdome. I'll never forget their screams, as they wailed through the television to me begging for water, for help, for mercy. I can't forget the limp baby, laying listless in its mother's arms as she walked barefoot on the burning hot pavement, seeking shelter from the sun. The bodies--"bodies" is such an impersonal word, isn't it? The mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, and grandparents strewn in the street, or floating face down, or being nibbled on by dogs. You can't just forget that horror.
I look at New Orleans and I see August 29th all over again. But for others, the New Orleans they see is the one they saw during the wall-to-wall coverage of Mardi Gras: the colorful floats, the dry streets, the street pulsating with life.
Off camera, the city still dies.
More below...
The pumps are
still broken, so that the water that may flood New Orleans will stay in New Orleans this time. The city's
tourism industry is struggling to keep above water. While rebuilding is buzzing away in the city's wealthier districts, in the Lower Ninth Ward, there is no gas. There is no water. As one local put it,
the Lower Ninth Ward is "dead."
The Army Corps of Engineers has worked day and night to rebuild the levees. But the levees are not ready to withstand another Katrina. They will be back to "pre-Katrina" levels by June 1st, the government promises. Not built better, not built higher, but the same. Indeed, some experts say that they are "substantially weaker" than before.
President Bush just requested $2.2 billion in emergency funding to repair Louisiana's damaged levees, but he is requiring the state to pick up another $270 million of the costs. Oh, and he left off lower Plaquemines Parish from the repair list. And he requested the extra funds only after Senator Landrieu placed a hold on his FCC nominee.
This is the reality of the rebuilding process. For eight months, we've seen piecemeal funding--drip, drip, drip--demonstrating that Congress and the President refuse to acknowledge that this may well be the costliest disaster in American history. Their actions reveal that they simply have not accepted that part of America has been utterly destroyed, that Americans are still scattered across our nation living as nomads without a home, and that slow action is just as much of a failure as no action at all.
It seems like every time the citizens of New Orleans and the rest of the affected areas try to lift their heads above water, a lack of leadership and a bungled bureaucracy shoves their heads down again. The roadblocks exist on the national and local level. Whether it's struggling to get funding for re-opened schools or being forced to clean and gut their homes by August 29th or risk having them razed, the citizens of the Gulf Coast know that they must move on, they must live like normal again, but they lack the ability and leadership to save themselves from the hell of their post-Katrina world. It's like the whole world is waiting for them to move on, but time stopped for the Gulf Coast on August 29th, preserving the helplessness, poverty, and human suffering of that day.
There is perhaps no starker example of how stagnant the situation is in some areas than this: eight months after Katrina hit, lifeless bodies of Americans are still being found:
Skeletonized or half-eaten by animals, with leathery, hardened skin or missing limbs, the bodies are lodged in piles of rubble, dangle from rafters or lie face down, arms outstretched on parlor floors.
How quickly we forget. How convienient it is to forget that horror and pretend it wasn't an American tragedy. How unfair it is for us to refuse to speak that unspoken obscenity. As one resident put it:
[W]e haven't found our deceased. Being honest with you, in my opinion, they forgot about us.
"They did not build nothing on 9/11 until they were sure that the damn dust was not human dust," she added, "so how you go on and build things in our city?
The coroner believes there are about 400 dead Americans whose bodies have yet to be found. There was no mention of them in President Bush's trip, where he praised the rebuilding process. Hurricane season is upon us once more. If another hurricane hits, the levees may not hold. And in some forgotten parts of New Orleans, corpses still grip to rafters. Drowned eight months ago, their tragedy forgotten, they will sit and wait for waters to rise, fated to be drowned and forgotten once again.