Note: Updated version of my diary from earlier in the week. I'm submitting as an Op-Ed all over the place. I poured my heart and soul into this one.
Like most people, my strongest memory of September 11th was the moment I first learned of the second plane hitting the tower. I was in a meeting, and one of the participants walked into the room and mumbled something about a terrorist attack in New York. The meeting organizer feigned a look of shock, shook her head, and said, "OK, should we get started?"
Personally, I wasn't ready to get to work. I immediately got up and called my wife, and got as much detail as I could. Then I returned to the meeting, interrupted them, and said, "Everything is not ok. More planes are unaccounted for. This is not over." There was uncomfortable silence. Predictably, the meeting organizer cleared her throat, then said, "OK, shall we continue?"
This week brought back an overwhelming deja vu for me, as I witnessed nearly two days of the same lack of real comprehension of a national tragedy, from both the members of the media and our nation's leaders. The state of national denial lasted through late Tuesday or even into Wednesday, as each individual came to a gentleman's agreement with reality on their own unique terms.
As the hurricane still churned in the Gulf last weekend, I briefly researched New Orleans and the city's hurricane readiness. What I learned in just a few hours was disconcerting, at best. First, I read a National Geographic article, from October, 2004, titled "Louisiana's Wetlands". This article describes a highly detailed hypothetical (at the time) scenario in which New Orleans is devastated by a hurricane. The scenario predicted 200 thousand would stay in the city, 50 thousand would die, and a million people would be left homeless. On Sunday evening, the National Weather Service predicted that "some levees in the greater New Orleans area could be overtopped."
Yet, in an ABC interview on Thursday morning, President Bush said, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." Nobody, that is, except nearly every rational person who was paying attention. The facts are clear that Bush himself certainly did not recognize the risk throughout his term in office. In fact, Bush cut funding to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in New Orleans every year since 2001 (From $147M in 2001 to $82M in 2005), leaving their levee repair and improvement projects under-funded and therefore, incomplete and overexposed to nature's wrath. And Bush chose to keep 35% of the Louisiana National Guard allocated to the Middle East during hurricane season.
Many have said that natural disasters should not be politicized. And I agree. But in many ways, there were multiple disasters at work here. There was the natural disaster of Hurricane Katrina, which was bad enough by itself. But the whirling dervishes of fiscal and personnel mismanagement at the federal level constituted their own disasters. National guardsmen in Iraq cannot assist with natural disasters in their home states, and neither can their amphibious equipment. Levees that are not fully maintained, not surprisingly, are not likely to hold when the water rises.
Through this research, I came to the conclusion that the inevitability of natural disasters can potentially be made worse by horribly mismanaged political priorities. Obviously, no hurricane is the fault of a politician, but advance readiness and rapid disaster response availability are core components of avoiding loss of life when disaster arrives at the shoreline.
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Early Monday, the storm hit, and there was immediately a false sense of relief, as word quickly spread through the media that Katrina was a "near miss" and a "close call". My own wife implied, in retrospect, that I was off the mark over my hurricane concerns. "It doesn't sound as bad as you say it is," she said. Callers on the radio used phrases such as "just like every other hurricane", and they spoke of how the media blows things out of proportion.
And to be fair, there are only two gears in the media when it comes to disasters: ON or OFF. And in the early part of the week, this story was full ON. But so was every other major hurricane in the past 10 years. And so was the story of Natalee Holloway in Aruba, and Michael Jackson and the "runaway bride". The television media has cried wolf a few too many times to keep people's attention when it is desperately needed. With the dramatic lead-in music, colorful shocking imagery, and carefully time-managed segments, how is a viewer supposed to determine the difference between category one Katrina and category five Katrina? Is there a major difference in the intensity of Fox News between ten hurricane-related deaths and ten thousand? For that matter, does the size of a headline in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel or the Chicago Tribune properly reflect the true magnitude of a tragedy?
On Sunday night, for example, Fox Six local news ran a three minute feature story on puppies - right after five minutes of ho-hum hurricane coverage.
Monday, while the rain was still falling in the French Quarter, WTMJ's Jeff Wagner informed us that those who stayed behind in their homes were "Stupid". "Why should emergency personnel have to rescue people who make such stupid decisions," he asked. Callers lined up to agree - apparently to a typical WTMJ listener, everybody has a car to drive to higher ground, everybody has credit cards to pay for a hotel, food and water for a few weeks, and everyone is in perfect health to undergo such a challenge. "They offered buses," callers said. "They had choices." Yes, they certainly did - choices like the Superdome, where the roof nearly blew off, a man intentionally jumped off the second floor balcony, and the filth in the bathrooms was unimaginable. And there were other choices, like the Convention Center, where as many as 15 thousand people were "lost" by FEMA until Thursday, with no food or water. No wonder so many people chose to stay in their homes.
Tuesday, the national media focus shifted almost exclusively to "looters" - the people who stayed behind in the city of New Orleans, which was 80 percent flooded by Tuesday, where there was no food and no water, and where there were still as many as 200,000 people who did not evacuate in time. With no food and water, people began to get desperate. So, naturally, they went to find essential life-sustaining supplies. Looking through pictures of "looters" from the Associated Press on Tuesday, I found only a few pictures of people carrying electronics or other non-essentials, while I found dozens of pictures of people carrying grocery bags full of food and water and diapers. In fact, one AP story mentioned that a "looter" dropped a grocery bag full of Raman Noodles while running away. While local emergency officials on the ground spoke openly of the complete absence of sufficient food and water, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh lambasted those people who tried to obtain their own essentials.
Meanwhile, Milwaukee radio focused on Brett Favre's missing family members, and possible economic impact. Gas price callers trumped hurricane callers by a two to one ratio. President Bush spent Tuesday on a public relations stint, delivering remarks on V-J Commemoration Day, and playing guitar with country music singer Mark Wills.
While most of America still bathed in ignorance, dehumanization and condescension, the people of New Orleans were climbing in attics to escape rising waters, and nearby levees (left unprepared by severe budget cuts) were crumbling under the increasing water pressure in Lake Pontchartrain. The calls for help early in the week were heard by some reporters and local officials, but were they heard by Wisconsinites? Or were we too busy sitting in towers of media-fueled ignorance, condescension and nicely packaged news segments to care about the real problems of real people elsewhere in our own country? "Complete denial" now has a dictionary picture, and its face is the local broadcast media.
Sometime around midweek, it hit me: This is how people go through the various stages of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), in real time. People making comments about "stupid" refugees can't possibly comprehend the devastation. This was painfully evident in the media, as one outlet after another shifted from five minutes of "routine" hurricane coverage, to hours of emotional scenes of tearful reporters and broken lives. It was evident in the initial throes of blind defensiveness in the right wing talk show hosts and bloggers, as they bounced fact after fact - even trying to argue that there were plenty of guardsmen oozing out of humvees and amphibious vehicles all over the damage zone. And yes, denial was even evident among my liberal friends - maybe even moreso than anywhere else. Why? Because we are a caring bunch, and we are personally impacted deeply and emotionally when others are in pain. The sheer magnitude of the disaster was hard for anyone to comprehend.
But later in the week, as media attention finally grew to a fever pitch, and buses and supplies finally began to roll in all over the stricken area, I couldn't help but wonder... How many lives were lost due to the inability of the media and the federal government to react quickly, with full comprehension and compassion, and without what appeared to be a strange condescension toward some of the victims. Unfortunately, those hours and days of comprehension delay came at a high cost for the hurricane refugees. Each hour of delay led to increased desperation, hunger, and fear. Refugee confusion on Monday slowly turned to desperation on Tuesday, and anger on Wednesday. Eventually, the delays and mismanagement led to increased incidents of lawlessness and last ditch acts of survival.
We have just witnessed the worst disaster in American history. This event cannot be marginalized by smiling news anchors. It cannot be book-ended by car and shampoo commercials, and it can't follow a network sit-com. It needs to be raw, and it needs to be felt, by coworkers, neighbors, family and friends. It needs to be enormously real. The influx of monetary donations are wonderful, but they are no substitute for the immediate compassionate action that, for days, seemed like it would never arrive.
Part of this process of coming to terms with this event is the process of accountability for those who let down the people of the Gulf region. And, someday very soon, after all of the bodies are out of the water and the refugees have found temporary homes, we need to speak out for every hurricane refugee who waited to be rescued for days, starving, scared and confused. We need to scream in protest for every mother and father who faced down the barrel of a gun while trying to obtain essential supplies. And, in doing so, we need to place blame squarely at the feet of those who are responsible for not doing everything possible to prevent any unnecessary loss of life.
We must start with the American media and the American president, who may have just experienced his "My Pet Goat, Part II" moment.
Please donate to the survivors of Hurricane Katrina at The Red Cross, or donate your spare bedroom at HurricaneHousing.org