Nearly seven months after Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans and forced out hundreds of thousands of residents, most evacuees say they have not found a permanent place to live, have depleted their savings and consider their life worse than before the hurricane, according to interviews with more than 300 evacuees conducted by The New York Times.The Times study is the first major effort to examine the lives and attitudes of those displaced by the storm's devastation at the six-month point, a moment when many must decide whether to establish a life in a new place or return home.
Fewer than a quarter of the participants in the study have returned to the same house they were living in before the hurricane, while about two-thirds said their previous home was unlivable. A fifth said their house or apartment had been destroyed. Many have not found work and remain separated from family members.
Still, most of those interviewed favor returning to the city, expressing a sense of optimism about the recovery process or, more often, a fierce yearning for home, as if staying away from New Orleans were like trying to breathe air through gills.
Is there anything more natural to people than to simply want to go home? And is there anything worse than our failure thus far to see that they can?
This relates in part to something I read yesterday by Publius at the blog Legal Fiction. He says we're wrong to try and blame what happened after Katrina on Bush and his administration alone:
A good rule to live by is to never attribute to individual characteristics what should be attributed to broader underlying or structural causes. Too often, progressives put the blame for the nation’s failed policies on Bush-the-individual, when they should be looking at other things – including themselves. Katrina is a perfect example. In the aftermath of the Katrina tragedy, too much of the blame was attributed to the individual personality failings of Bush – he’s aloof, he’s dumb, he doesn’t care, etc. The truth is that Katrina tragedy was caused by New Orleans’ massive poverty – poverty that is appalling in a country as rich as ours in the 21st century. And that poverty is itself the product of unaddressed historical failures and modern apathy – apathy that extends across the political spectrum.
Focusing the attention on Bush-the-individual serves two purposes. First, it makes everything easier to understand. It’s sort of like individual-centric sixth-grade history that kids learn – George Washington caused America to be free; the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand caused World War I, Bush caused the Katrina deaths, etc. Second, it allows liberals to ignore their own culpability. With the exception of John Edwards, not a single major Democratic presidential candidate talked about poverty, much less risked any political capital to address it. And the much ballyhooed netroots don’t seem to give a shit either (and I indict myself in that as well). We have all forgotten about poverty and thus we are all to blame for Katrina – and the next Katrina. But focusing on Bush-the-individual is convenient because he plays the role of scapegoat very well.
Sadly, he's right. I don't mean to be so hard on liberal and progressive allies, but for most of them the story of Katrina is over. Now that FEMA and the government in general is doing merely a half-ass job of helping the evacuees instead of totally botching it as they were in the days after the hurricane hit, there's nothing to criticize Bush over. And as a result, many of them have moved on to new shenanigans and incompetence like the port security deal. But Publius is right that the real reason New Orleans was hit so hard is because many of it's former residents were so poor, and had nowhere to go or no way to leave when the storm rolled in. Even if the levees had been perfectly constructed and the floodwaters had never touched the streets of New Orleans, it would still be a city full of some of the poorest people in America...and it would be a non-story. It's our fault for tolerating that poverty, our fault for allowing any poverty so egregious in the richest country in the world. And it's our fault for tolerating evacuees spread across the United States with no way and no money to get home, and nowhere to live even if they could get there. This is not a failing of Bush, or the GOP, or "politicians" in general. It's our fault, every single one of us, for not doing enough to change it.
Even as both groups flounder, most said they believed that the rest of the nation, and politicians in Washington, have moved on. "I don't think anybody cares, really," said Robert Rodrigue, a semiretired computer programmer who has returned to his home in the suburb of Metairie. "New Orleans is kind of like at the bottom of the country, and they just forget about us."
He's right, to our shame.
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