The Massacre of New Orleans

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Even though I am an American citizen, and currently reside in the US I am a perpetual foreigner. I look at the US through the eyes of a well-informed outsider, almost an insider, yet always evaluating things from the outside. I don't identify as US citizen except in the legal sense, and US citizens don't necessarily treat me like fellow US citizen.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina I keep looking at people around me and I do not see any undue horror that thousands of their fellow country people are dead. This in itself is somewhat incomprehensible to me, but hey, judge not lest you be judged says the good book. Perhaps millions of US citizens just keep their emotions hidden. Or perhaps the sadness is just too much, or whatever, I can't come up with more excuses.

OK, so maybe sadness is the wrong angle. Maybe I should be looking for different reactions. Should US citizens be outraged? Maybe not. It isn't like any government can do anything about natural disasters. They just happen, right? And New Orleans being hit with a category 4 hurricane is not something that was ever predicted, right? Hell, this storm was such a fluke, a one in a billion chance of this happening. Nevermind that scientists have been talking about this for years. Articles have been written, scenarios drawn up, and recommendations made. Nobody took it seriously enough apparently to do something about this.

At this stage I don't know whether people in the USA even get outraged about anything except their precious little right to bear arms and the price of gasoline. Well good, now they can take their SUV's and their rifle and drive through New Orleans.

OK, so outrage is beyond the emotional repertoire of US citizens. Maybe fear is something they understand. After 9-11 every red-blooded American was out to go get somebody for New York. Never mind that many US citizens avoid anything related to New York like the plague, probably would never go anywhere near the Twin Towers, and generally speaking despise the self-absorbed, provincial, and somewhat snooty denizens of New York City. I can't say I blame them; that garbage-strewn, rat infested shithole called Manhattan gets way too much play in the news anyway. Yet after 9-11 everybody was embracing New York City like a long lost cousin they secretly had a crush on. Hell, for some people New York only became as a real place when 19 shitheads decided to murder several thousand US citizens, and do some charity demolition work by removing two eye-sores from the NYC skyline. Suddenly New York stopped just being a set for Law and Order and became a city, not just any city. A city for all Americans.

For a while the getting was good. Some sheep herders in some country most US citizens can't spell, never mind find on a map, got killed from afar. Towel heads, camel jockeys, and other assorted 'Arab' looking people got shot, and that seemed to do wonders after the big bummer of having a US city bombed.

Let us contrast this with New Orleans. Perhaps up to twice the number of people killed in NYC are dead and dying in New Orleans. Over a million US citizens are internal refugees. A city is close to being wiped out. Yet the response is somewhat tepid. That's right, after having a US city bombed once all of the USA is jaded. So tragically hip they can't even scrape enough wits together to contemplate their own danger.

The Massacre of New Orleans is a study in how a system does not work. Ultimately it is not important whose jurisdiction is preserved, what authority is granted, or which agency is responsible. From the city government up to state government all the way to the top office in the federal level there has been a massive dereliction of duty. Thousands of US citizens were left to die due to the incompetence, negligence, apathy, and sheer stupidity of all the systems involved. The lack of a systematic, thorough, and pre-prepared evacuation plan points to the willful negligence of the responsibilities that are inherent of governing bodies. The sheer amount of deaths was preventable, and as it was not prevented responsibility for the dead lays on the shoulders of so many governing bodies.

OK, so as a country the USA says, OK screw the New Orleans people, that's what you get for living in a city under the sea level. OK, but that is not the point. The point is that despite the bad location of New Orleans, disasters of similar magnitudes can happen at a number of places, and yet people are not putting one and one together to understand that a repeat of the negligence of New Orleans can happen in any city. Hell, New Orleans would have been better off had it been a terrorist attack, maybe then the cowboy Administration of George Bush would have ridden in with horses and six-shooters to make the bad guys go away.

What is so tragic is that this is a systems failure. It is never beautiful when systems fail because for the most part the idea is that you design a system not to fail, or if they fail for unforeseen circumstances that they fail in a gradual manner so as not to take out everything lest the failure of the system be more catastrophic than the even itself. Having proper evacuation plans is not something governing bodies can ignore, especially as cities get bigger and bigger and evacuations become more difficult.

The biggest tragedy of it all is that several thousands of US citizens were allowed to die in such a cruel and callous manner in the richest nation on the planet. Calling it anything less than a massacre is not possible.