Two Floods: Brisbane and New Orleans

I thought so, and now I’ve confirmed it: the Liberals here are conservatives. What would you expect from a country where everybody drives on the wrong side of the road and it’s getting warm outside when garden thermometers reach 32 degrees?

Prime Minister John Howard, a conservative who is not a Liberal, seeks to align this country with the George Bush vision of how things ought to be, in world affairs, at least, and -- Liberal, liberal, or conservative -- the Australians we’ve met have been much too polite to say anything negative to us about our home country or its current leadership.

On Saturday, though, I overheard an elderly Brisbane man expressing a harsh viewpoint to a friend about Hurricane Rita’s threat to the Gulf Coast. “As individuals, some Americans are great people,” he said, “but as a country? Who could deserve a storm like that more!?”

Some of my friends back home who are politically to my left would understand immediately, as I did, why he might say such a thing. At the top of a long list would be Iraq and global warming. Other friends politically to my right, including some I respect, admire, and even love, would dismiss the old guy’s rant with the wave of a hand. They would have no inkling of a justification for such a harsh view of America in the second term of Bush and Chaney and their neo-con friends.

THE CONSERVATIVE/LIBERAL DIVIDE

Conservatives. Liberals. Where I come from, those of us who identify with one side or the other have difficulty imagining how any decent, intelligent person who pays attention could have voted for (or against) George Bush. Because of the huge divide I see even in my own family, I am fascinated by various reactions to the horrors of post-hurricane New Orleans. Some of those reactions seem to me to be profoundly colored by biases indicative of extremes in political outlooks.

Last week I received by email one assessment of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath, written by a not-identified person (a man, I’m guessing) who recalls being in a cyclone-triggered flood here in Brisbane, in 1974. After the storm passed, the relatively high ground of his neighbourhood was an island surrounded by a large lake of floodwater. Marooned and isolated from the rest of the city for days, he and his neighbours, the writer recalls, organized themselves, shared what they had, and made it through quite well.

People here still talk about that terrible flood frequently. It’s a living part of the psyche of Brisbane residents to this day, but the email writer says there was virtually no looting or other bad behaviour and he wants to know why, in New Orleans, people behaved differently? “Why didn't the people in the Superdome make any effort to organize themselves? Why didn't groups of men patrol the restrooms to prevent rapes?”

He has answers to his own questions: “We have gone a long way in the past 40 years to creating a dysfunctional society where self reliance, pride in one's self and a sense of right and wrong are no longer esteemed or even valued.”

At fault, he says, are “our government and media” who have (a) told minorities that whatever happens to them is a result of racism and that they cannot succeed in our societies; (b) allowed crime to be excused because it results from poverty which is not the criminal’s fault; (c) shown adolescent girls that it’s okay, even lucrative, to have babies with little hope that their boyfriends will become true fathers; and (d) promoted the notion that society has no right to impose on people morals and old-fashioned judgments of right and wrong. He concludes, “God help us. We're reaping what we sowed.”

While there are grains of uncomfortable truth here, the implication that the people waiting for rescue at the Superdome last month were inferior to the writer and his neighbours in Brisbane in 1974 is answerable in several ways.

He and his neighbours, for one thing, were high-ground dwellers. I expect that what is true in Brisbane today was true in 1974: the elevation of the land on which one’s residence sits correlates with its value, and, therefore, with one’s own financial resources. My wife and I learned quickly that we probably couldn’t afford a Brisbane-area house advertised as having a view of any sort, and we’re not poor. Those marooned above the 1974 flood line were, I expect, people with resources not so common in the swampier neighbourhoods here at that time and not so common in the poorer parts of New Orleans when their flood came.

ON-SITE REPORTING

Further, there is already one report, from two emergency technicians (EMTs) who were in New Orleans when Katrina hit, which indicates that citizens there did organize and did do a lot for each other. Larry Bradshaw and Lorie Beth Slonsky wrote, in a piece that has been widely circulated on the web, that they were barred by National Guardsmen from both the Superdome and the Convention Center after they were turned out of their hotel on the fourth day after the storm hit.

Their experience from then on, they said, was one of self-help and organization being met with official hostility and deception. After being prevented by an adjacent suburb’s police from simply walking out of New Orleans under their own power, Bradshaw and Slonsky and others set up an encampment which some of us may have seen on TV because they built it where it would be noticed, “in the middle of the Ponchartrain Expressway on the center divide, between the O'Keefe and Tchoupitoulas exits.”

Supplied with found and/or stolen C-rations and water, they made a community that flourished for a while. Bradshaw and Slonsky wrote: “We organized a clean up and hung garbage bags from the rebar poles. We made beds from wood pallets and cardboard. We designated a storm drain as the bathroom and the kids built an elaborate enclosure for privacy out of plastic, broken umbrellas, and other scraps. We even organized a food recycling system where individuals could swap out parts of C-rations (applesauce for babies and candies for kids!).”

They offered food and water to people passing by and their numbers grew to 80 or 90. A woman with a battery-powered radio learned that their high-ground encampment was being noticed by relief and news organizations and that those organizations were asking officials what was being done for these families.

The result? Bradshaw and Slonsky report: “Just as dusk set in, a Gretna Sheriff showed up, jumped out of his patrol vehicle, aimed his gun at our faces, screaming, ‘Get off the f---ing freeway.’ A helicopter arrived and used the wind from its blades to blow away our flimsy structures. As we retreated, the sheriff loaded up … our food and water.”

Law enforcement agencies during this crisis, Bradshaw and Slonsky concluded, were threatened by congregations of people of 20 or more, fearing gangs or riots. Their group sought to stay together to have safety in numbers, but that was impossible because “the agencies would force us into small, atomized groups.” These two EMTs and about a half dozen others took refuge together in an abandoned bus, seeking to be safe from both from criminals and from the police. The next day they walked for hours in their small group until they found some New Orleans firemen who arranged to airlift them out of the city.

COMMUNITY, HEROES

So maybe immoral, dependent childishness was not the main story in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina. It was, in fact, a brutal place when people were fighting for food and water for themselves and their families, Bradshaw and Slonsky observed, but, when these most basic needs were met (as, indeed, they were in the situation of the Brisbane folks reported upon earlier), “People began to look out for each other, working together and constructing a community.”

This testimony from two who lived through the situation and reported from their own experience concluded: “If the relief organizations had saturated the City with food and water in the first 2 or 3 days, the desperation, the frustration and the ugliness would not have set in.”

Help was promised but did not come, and so ordinary people stepped up, according to Bradshaw and Slonsky, and it was the common folk who were the real heroes of the situation. Among those they single out for praise are these:
• “The maintenance workers who used a fork lift to carry the sick and disabled.
• “The engineers, who rigged, nurtured and kept the generators running.
• “The electricians who improvised thick extension cords stretching over blocks to share the little electricity we had in order to free cars stuck on rooftop parking lots.
• “Nurses who took over for mechanical ventilators and spent many hours on end manually forcing air into the lungs of unconscious patients to keep them alive.
• “Doormen who rescued folks stuck in elevators.
• “Refinery workers who broke into boat yards, ‘stealing’ boats to rescue their neighbors clinging to their roofs in flood waters.
• “Mechanics who helped hot-wire any car that could be found to ferry people out of the City.
• “And the food service workers who scoured the commercial kitchens improvising communal meals for hundreds of those stranded.”

From a distance mediated by TV images, those of us who were not there may project upon stranded New Orleans flood victims our liberal or conservative biases, but at least these two who can speak from experience tell us that a lot of people acted with skill, organization, and pragmatism on behalf of each other even when the appointed guardians of our society failed, for so many days and nights, to do so.

Sounds like good old American (or Australian) initiative to me. – Bob


P.S. As I eat lunch most weekdays, I watch delayed telecasts of the U.S. evening news from ABC and CBS. Today I learned something shocking, and the CBS anchor prefaced this item by saying “you may not believe this:”

Former FEMA director Michael Brown is continuing to work at FEMA for two more weeks (with full pay according to another source) as a “contractor.” A spokesman for the Homeland Security Department said he’ll advise on "some of his views on his experience with Katrina.''