In its coverage of the chaotic aftermath of the devastating Hurricane Katrina, the media has employed a common tactic—blaming the victims of a social catastrophe for the social catastrophe itself. There should be no question that the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina is as much a social catastrophe as a natural one: it was President Bush, not Mother Nature, who cut $71.2 million in funding from the New Orleans Corps of Engineers—money which could have been used to reinforce the city’s canal system and would have prevented some of the flooding and damage caused by Katrina, but instead went to the Iraq war. It was the local, state, and federal governments that failed to provide a sensible evacuation strategy for the poor in the South who had no means of transportation, no place to go, and no money to afford shelter elsewhere, leaving tens of thousands of people with no choice but to await the hurricane, which may have killed thousands of these abandoned people in New Orleans alone. It is the government and the richest corporations that are responsible for global climate change, which undoubtedly is a major cause of the increasingly severe weather that is wrecking the Gulf Coast of the United States and the rest of the world.
In spite of this, the media continues to blame the survivors of Katrina for the tragedy that is occurring. The media has repeatedly attacked the “stubborn” residents of Louisiana and Mississippi who “willfully” refused to obey evacuation orders, never mentioning that the poor had no means to escape the disaster. The people stranded in New Orleans—mostly poor people of color—are also attacked for their “savage” behavior, which includes “looting” and “pillaging” abandoned stores for food, water, and clothing. The survivors, who have been living in horrendous conditions without food, water, electricity, or air conditioning, are described as a “mob” of heathens who have abandoned civilized behavior creating a situation of “anarchy” in New Orleans. Reporters have made allegations about isolated cases of violence based on anecdotal information.
The real criminals responsible for the social catastrophe of Katrina have hardly been discussed in the media at all. There is no reason that a single American citizen should have been killed by the hurricane, and there is no reason that a single person should still be stranded in New Orleans or any other Southern city today, but because of the criminal negligence repeatedly shown towards the situation by the United States’ government, the crises continues, and the body count continues to increase. The Las Angeles Times has been one of the few media outlets to question the government’s response to the hurricane, and it asks some very pertinent questions:
“This disaster was all but scripted; why wasn't the response? Why did it take so long to evacuate the poor, the elderly and the tourists unlucky enough to be caught with no way out of town? Where was the food and water? Why were the police left to choose between rescuing people from the floods and saving them from predators?”
The general trajectory of Hurricane Katrina was known days before it hit land. The government could have easily put together a plan to evacuate all people from the storm’s path, and could have saved thousands of lives. The US government did no such thing, and every person living in harms way was left to fend for his or herself against the oncoming storm. People from the upper and middle classes had access to transportation and could afford to stay in hotels for weeks, and thus were able to evacuate before the hurricane struck land. The poor, the old, and the sick, on the other hand, could simply not afford to leave.
Once the storm had passed over New Orleans, the government again had a chance to save thousands of lives, and again showed criminal negligence. The US government has abandoned the citizens of New Orleans for days, when it could have quickly evacuated the city and aided the starving and thirsty. Instead, it revealed its true priorities by sending several thousand National Guardsmen and soldiers to bring “stability,” (a.k.a., martial law) and stop the looting of private property by the starving people of New Orleans. “They have M-16s and are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and I expect they will” said Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco. Apparently, our government thinks that sending armed troops to gun down civilians is the appropriate response to a tragedy that has been described as “much worse than 9/11.”
The tragedy of Hurricane Katrina also reflects the more general negligence of the US government towards issues of global climate change, which, if New Orleans is an accurate model, is a far greater problem for the poor than for the rich. Many experts have pointed to a connection between increasingly severe hurricanes that have battered the Gulf Coast region and green house gas emissions. The US government continues to protect corporate interests, and has taken no action whatsoever to curb global warming, thus ensuring that tragedies such as that caused by Hurricane Katrina will occur more frequently and more devastatingly in the future.
Let there be no mistake about it, the actual hurricane may have been a natural disaster, but all the deaths that have occurred and will occur are the consequences of a man-made disaster. The reason for the government’s sluggish response is that the plutocrats in charge would rather spend billions of dollars in a murderous war of expansion than a few million to pull its own drowning and starving citizens to safety. We can only hope that our government will attempt to rectify its mistake by acting quickly and forcefully to evacuate all of the 20,000 refugees still trapped in New Orleans and to provide displaced people life-saving aid, before more people die.
