Off the Map

A good friend of mine, who has been living with relatives in three different states for five long months, finally has a new home. She has landed with her husband and daughter in the D.C. area, where, she says, people don’t even bat an eye when she tells them they are from New Orleans. Not that they want attention or sympathy—they have had plenty of that—but they are surprised to see, even in our nation’s capitol, how completely people have moved on from Katrina.

I am heartened every time I hear a story on NPR or a cable news program about New Orleans. But it seems as if the stories are falling on deaf ears. Here, you cannot escape news of the recovery (or lack of one)--the catastrophically inadequate government response from the landfall of the storm up to the present, and the seemingly insurmountable hurdles that people here are facing as they rebuild their homes and their lives. I was surprised when we first came back at the end of October to see that every day the Times-Picayune’s front page and editorial page are almost all Katrina-related, every local television newscast is at least 75% about the aftermath of the storm, and even on the radio every other ad is about how “we are here to help you rebuild your lives.” And it is still like that. Here it is still all recovery all of the time. And you get so used to it that you can’t believe that everywhere else in the country people hear almost nothing about what is going on here. And Bush’s speech did nothing to change that.

A heartening message from a Massachusetts man appeared in the letters to the editors yesterday. He wrote: “Last weekend I visited the city. I was shocked to see how much has yet to be done. . . . It saddens me to see your city, so broken and so forgotten by the rest of the country. I implore you to keep New Orleans in the spotlight. Residents should jump in front of cameras, rush to talk to reporters and pressure those in charge not to forget you. I will continue to do what I can by writing to my senators. I want my tax money to go to the people of New Orleans and surrounding areas. Let's take care of our own."

I published an op-ed in the Times-Picayune in late November. It is sad to see how little we have progressed since then. The feeling we had then of being abandoned has only increased. And now as we approach Mardi Gras, the cameras will roll here. But will they show the suffering and desperation behind the revelry? I have written to all of the key Congressmen and Senators as well as President Bush, and have urged my friends and family to do the same. But that was months ago. Now where do we go from here? As the New York Times wrote today, “The sad fact is that New Orleans has all but dropped off the map of national priorities. Listening to President Bush's State of the Union address, one would be hard pressed to guess that one of America's greatest cities and the region around it had been laid to waste only five months earlier.”

After I published my op-ed, some people wrote to tell me that in this great country of ours, we have to learn to fend for ourselves. We can’t look to government to solve our problems. So the culture of right-wing aversion to public programs has come to this! We are so afraid of government that we will send a check to the Red Cross (which can provide only temporary assistance) but we won’t demand that our tax dollars help to rebuild one of the nation’s greatest cultural and historical treasures after the most destructive natural disaster and engineering blunder in our nation’s history.

As I write this, I can’t stop thinking about my dear colleague, a poet from Nigeria, who related his harrowing tale of escaping the floodwaters after Katrina. After being herded with thousands of others in various locations over a five-day period with no food, water, toilets, shoes, or medical care, he kept thinking, “I can’t believe this is happening here, in America. This is what leaders do [abandon you] in third world countries. And I have plenty of experience with third world countries,” he said. And he couldn’t believe that five months later, the city is still in the state of utter devastation that it is in—and this is America.