The Automatik

Before my trip to New Orleans earlier this month, I was nervous and anxious. I was scared to see the real-life version of the destruction that I had only previously viewed in photographic and video form. The closest analogy to what it felt like to finally witness the devastation of the city from the failed levee floodwalls is the feeling I got the first time I boarded a plane and I exclaimed, “It looks just like it does in the movies!”

Unfortunately the devastation in New Orleans and surrounding areas, as well as the Mississippi Gulf Coast, is not a movie, although Michael Moore may have already started planning his next attempt to capitalize on tragedy. But it does make me ponder why that was my initial reaction. Is it because we’re so used to seeing the images of devastation on television that it no longer seems real to us?

The reason I was in New Orleans, as I mentioned in my previous essay, was to attend the funeral of my beloved grandmother, also known as “Maw Maw Alice.” She was 94. She lived in Lakeview for most of the last fifty years, with the exception of the past few years, when she lived in a nursing home and then an assisted living center after she fell and broke her leg in 2002 and was no longer strong enough to live by herself.

Maw Maw and several members of that side of the family, including my father and stepmother, evacuated shortly before Hurricane Katrina smacked into the Gulf Coast. After they had returned and the water had been drained out of the city, my father took her to see Lakeview, so she knew what had happened and was aware of the vast amount of damage to the area. After her living center was up and running again, she lived there until shortly before her death in April.

Her move to the assisted living center was a big change for Maw Maw. After living in the same neighbourhood for nearly half of her life, it could be nothing less. She didn’t see her old neighbours as often, and in fact, she saw them less frequently in the few years before she moved to the center because she was less mobile and didn’t get out to Sunday Mass or the local Catholic school fair or bingo or garage sales as often. Yet we all saw the neighbours at Maw Maw’s annual Christmas Eve party.

But the neighbourhood remained, that is until the levee floodwall at the 17th Street Canal breached and drowned Lakeview, starting sometime around 9:45 a.m. on August 29, 2005, scattering thousands of people and destroying their homes, schools, businesses, and places of worship in the process.

I know you’ve probably heard about storm surge and overtopping and levees and floodwalls and breaches and the Army Corps of Engineers hundreds of times since last year, but I would like you to look at this slide show that clearly shows not only the affected areas but also what affected them.

With that in mind, I want to discuss three Lakeview residents who were at the funeral: Edna*, Jeanette*, and Maw Maw’s nephew, known to the family as Junior.

Edna lived two doors down from Maw Maw for as long as I can remember. Her daughter and her grandkids came to Maw Maw’s Christmas Eve parties for as many years as I can remember, too. Jeanette lived at the house on the corner of Maw Maw’s street. Her kids have been grown and married for years, but Jeanette (and her husband, when he wasn’t in the poor health that he is these days) also came to the Christmas Eve parties. Jeanette worked with St. Dominic’s Church and also had frequent garage sales, probably donating the proceeds to a church charity. Junior had been living in his mother’s house (Maw Maw’s sister) across the street from Jeanette for almost the last decade after renovating it.

None of these people live in Lakeview any longer. Although Junior has been involved in the real estate business for years and was able to purchase a home in the suburbs, that house was destroyed by floodwaters and a fallen tree. Edna moved in with her daughter’s family in St. Rose, Louisiana, which is about a half hour’s drive from Lakeview (or at least it was Pre-Katrina traffic hell). Jeanette and her husband are living in an apartment building in Mandeville, Louisiana, on the North shore of Lake Pontchartrain, about a 45 minute drive from Lakeview.

When my father saw Edna and Jeanette at the funeral he wept, not just out of gratitude but because he saw them as “lost souls.” Their entire way of life is gone and may not ever return, at least not in their lifetimes (both women are of Medicare age).

It’s probably difficult for anyone under the age of thirty or who doesn’t have children of their own to realize how deeply devastating the legacy of Hurricane Katrina has been for these people and the hundreds of thousands who have been displaced by the destruction of New Orleans. I’ve personally moved several times in my life, from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, to other states, and now to another country. And although I mourn the loss of Lakeview where I spent many years visiting and where I lived for the decade before I moved to Canada, my history there is but a drop in a bucket.

When I was a child, there were other relatives that lived near Maw Maw, and other neighbours with whom we spent time. I had aunt, uncles, and great-grandmothers that lived across the street. Death is a part of life and the death of neighbours as well as relatives is expected. Yet although Maw Maw knew what happened to Lakeview, in a way I’m glad she’s not around to see that it has continued to remain a ghost town, nearly nine months after Hurricane Katrina.

You can rebuild a house, a school, a church, or a grocery store. But you can’t rebuild a lifetime. Edna and Jeanette will never have their lives back and they mourn the loss of those lives with a grief that I can’t even begin to imagine. Seeing their faces at the funeral was enough.

Lakeview, although it ceases to exist as a functioning neighbourhood, looks like a resort town compared to the Lower Ninth Ward, also in Orleans Parish. I didn’t have the time or the stamina to take a tour when I was in town earlier in the month, but here is a recent video taken on a drive through the area. (Note: you don’t have to have a video player to watch this.) It’s horrifying to watch and even more so when you realize that not much has changed in the area in the last almost-nine months, as can be evidenced by these photos, taken in December of 2005.

Daily Kos also reported on May 11 that the Lower Ninth Ward looks much the same as it did last year.

Photo Credits: Delaware Dem

Yes folks, this is New Orleans, Louisiana in the United States of America. This isn’t Baghdad or Fallujah or Rwanda.

Now, as one of the Daily Kos commenters correctly pointed out, a big part of the reason that areas haven’t seen much, if any, change in the last eight or nine months is because there is no infrastructure to support rebuilding or in many cases, no passable roads. She was speaking from the experience of the time she spent in Bay St. Louis, Waveland, and Gulfport, Mississippi, three towns that look more like the sites of atomic bomb tests than a place in which people would sit around on their screened-in porches watching birds and squirrels frolic in the yard. But that’s still no excuse. What excuse is there when you read about a couple who were living in their car as of March 2006, waiting in vain for FEMA to unlock the trailer in their yard?

Take Edna, Jeanette, and Junior and extrapolate that to hundreds of thousands of people and you are starting to come close to what life is like in New Orleans, Louisiana and the Gulf Coast of Mississippi today. People are gone. Neighbourhoods are vacant or have ceased to exist, replaced by rubble. Streets are empty. Schools are closed. Restaurants are closed. Post offices are closed. Grocery stores are closed. Churches are closed. Today, the day before, the day before that, the day before that, and as many days as you can count backwards to the end of August 2005.

I weep for Lakeview and Bay St. Louis because I know those places and I love those places and I know what their loss means to people who lived there and loved there. I didn’t live in the Lower Ninth Ward but I know that there are people who feel about that neighbourhood the way my father and I feel about Lakeview and Bay St. Louis.

The Lower Ninth Ward was not a place of affluence, but it was still a place where families lived and cherished each other. Yet there are those who would say things about it and other neighbourhoods in New Orleans which betray an insidious threat. Hidden in phrases about destroying crime zones and breaking out of poverty cycles is a push to decimate neighbourhoods and permanently displace families.

From the May 4, 2006 edition of The Black Commentator (which does not spare any sympathy for New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin for his participation in this process):

This brings attention to two other fatal flaws in the logic of “moving to opportunity” policy. It is based on a demonized image of the reprobate poor, who make trouble for themselves and others. Yes, the drug dealers are swept out of the 9th ward, but so are countless others, often single mothers with children, with an extended kin network of siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, and that heroic grandmother, who indeed have deep roots in the communities from which they are being evicted. How is it that this Gang of 200, from their ivory towers and gilded offices, presume to speak for the poor? Tossing in a caveat to the effect that “we do not seek to depopulate the city or its historically black communities” must be read literally. They want only to depopulate the city of concentrated poverty, and they will leave intact middle-class black communities that will insulate them from charges of racism.

Who are these people that are being thus shut out? They are the friends and relatives of the people that are still missing as of May 2, 2006. According to the Department of Health and Human Services there are over 400 people still missing although this has been reduced considerably from the February count of over 2,300 people. According to DHH, there have been 1,296 deceased victims of Hurricane Katrina. 1,296 victims of the storm (in Louisiana alone) may seem just like a number, but we must never forget images like these, compiled from the Scout Prime Blogspot in September of 2005.

Although some conservatives have claimed that the majority of deaths were whites and not African-Americans, research done by the New Vision Institute seems to indicate otherwise.

A more likely scenario is that racial segregation in New Orleans has left African-Americans in residential environments that are more disadvantaged across multiple dimensions, including their vulnerability to natural disaster.

Or in the case of Hurricane Katrina, man-made disaster.

These statistics and analyses are chilling enough until you read about the “credible rumours” of victims of US military snipers.

Verification has come in regarding the overwhelming number of people that were killed by US military sniper teams in the aftermath of Katrina. The exact number count is shady at best, but does run upwards to 2,000. The Mississippi River and holes in Bayou Segnette State Park are the overwhelming areas for bod (sic) disposal.
– Gulf Sails Blogspot, November 3, 2005

What even more disturbing than that is the next bullet point from this same blog entry:

The military, FBI and NOPD Swat Teams can also be credited with the outrageous drop in crime in this city. One of the methods is if they see a group of black men loitering around on the street, they approach with guns raised, take names and say “If we see you guys hanging around again tomorrow, you’re getting shipped out of the city. There’s too much work in this city for you to be hanging out on a corner.” And they mean it.

So I guess not much has changed since Katrina, has it?

These images of devastation, these stories of death, destruction, ruined lives, obliterated neighborhoods, and every Maw Maw and Edna and Jeanette and Junior out there are not the stuff of movies or even reality television. They are the reality of what has happened, the burden that the survivors must bear every day, and perhaps most upsetting of all, the legacy of years of racism, political corruption, and neglect, and the shameful truth that there are people who choose not to see what is happening in their own country.

This is America in 2006.

*Names have been changed.