Remembering Hurricane Katrina & The People We Lost in New Orleans

PREFACE

It was August 29 Monday morning 4 years ago today that we watched with horror as hurricane Katrina slammed into the southeastern coast of Louisiana, and Mississippi,her arms would stretch from Texas to Florida, and her devastation is still felt today. With the property damage topping $100 billion, it was the most costly natural disaster in U.S. history, but the loss of life in the U.S., mostly in New Orleans, came to 1836 people, which was far more devastating.

 I remember watching the news only a couple of days prior at a friend’s house, not far from my own just outside of Lafayette. We were watching as she quickly gained strength after having just passed over Florida as a cat.1 hurricane. She was moving slowly toward our coast and nobody seemed particularly concerned, in fact my friend had another friend over from Bossier City, in northern Louisiana, who was passing through on his way to a golf tournament in New Orleans. We were watching as news reporters were asking passers by on the streets why they hadn’t left yet, and many said they hadn’t been aware that there was a storm coming, and of course the questions concerning the levees were being voiced. This brought the obvious question to my mind, why wasn’t there a mandatory evacuation? When I asked the question out loud one of my friends simply said what most were thinking “If it was that serious, then governor Blanco or Mayor Nagin would have called for one.” But they didn’t, not until the last minute. We often joke in Louisiana that we don’t tolerate corruption in our elected officials we insist upon it, and we suffered for not insisting on competency instead. There is plenty of blame to go around, but the lions share rests right here in Louisiana. Now, many claimed that racism was the motivation for the neglect; I believe that this is somewhat true in the sense that most of the people who were neglected were poor, impoverished, and black and because of this the flags and whistles that set the wheels of action in motion never started blowing or waving. I believe that this was because the psyches of those in power are calloused toward the powerless and the poor, and so much more when they happen to be black. I don’t believe that there were any conscious efforts to deny these people their basic human dignity due to skin color, and I don’t think that it was a white problem; I think that this form of racism, and to a lesser degree classism, is simply the lack of respect for those who don’t have, by those who do. This is what I know for sure, the people of New Orleans deserved better than that.