A few years ago, sitting in the hot embrace of a New Orleans afternoon, drink in hand, I was suddenly struck by the city's singular appeal to the senses, to the spirit; its exuberant response to human appetites -- the food, the music, the architecture, the voodoo, the people living in the moment.
In that moment, I determined that New Orleans was proof of the existence of a human soul: If we did not have souls, we would not need New Orleans.
Now, with the rest of the world (note the foreign aid from Sri Lanka), I watch from a distance as the city and its people try desperately to escape the current hellish moment -- and, in important ways, all of us. President Bush has declared that those trapped in the city and all along the Gulf Coast “are not refugees but Americans.” His intention, I think, was to strike an inspirational note, to invoke the same sense of American exceptionalism that has so animated his thinking about our role in the world, but one is left to wonder what it means not to be a refugee but an American. The first inference one draws is that they are somehow mutually exclusive. A second guess is that the commander in chief was attempting to evoke the sense of displacement many people felt watching the disaster unfold on television:
Could it really be that in America the poorest, least able people would be left homeless and hungry, with no hope and no prospects other than what they could conjure up for themselves? Is that us?
Yes, yes, and yes!
The truth about Katrina and New Orleans is that the crippling lack of options that caused people to stay and die are a function of poverty that is ingrained in the fabric of many American lives. Nearly a third of the families, and nearly half the children, in New Orleans live in poverty. Louisiana is 49th in national poverty rates, just ahead of Mississippi and just behind Alabama. Katrina, in a manner of speaking, chose poor targets.
And while the catastrophe and the worldwide media attention it generated served up shocking new images, they did not produce any new truths.
Poor people get stuck all the time. They get trapped in the 9th Ward of New Orleans, in bad schools, in deadly neighborhoods, in the Superdome. Many are permanently locked out of the myth that is the American dream. The sensibilities that led the president to say they “are not refugees but Americans” are exactly the same as those that led someone I know to say, “The pictures look like Port-au-Prince.”
But that is mythmaking of the highest order. The misery that washed up in Katrina's wake is the daily reality of lives stripped down to the basics and thrown into high relief. And deep inside we know it how wrong that is. If we didn't have consciences, New Orleans would be less disturbing.
The latest response from Washington has been frantic. By the end of this week, there will be another $51.8 billion in the pipeline for rescue and recovery. Already the effort is consuming between $700 million and a $1 billion each day. The new money may be spent faster than it'll take to drain New Orleans.
But even as the repaired levees go back to work and the waters begin to recede and we wait for the living to find one another and the dead to show themselves, we know that as the shock to our senses will soon be replaced by hard facts -- jobs and lives lost, homes and businesses destroyed, families and communities broken apart or disappeared.
One estimate says that $20 billion in cash crops will be lost. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) says it has 25,000 body bags on hand. Twenty-five thousand: That's almost half the death toll in Vietnam.
There will likely be a czar hired to oversee the reconstruction, and maybe some people will be fired. The federal disaster-response apparatus may be reconfigured. “It is time we move FEMA to higher ground,” one member of Congress said this week.
And all in all, it will feel like progress. We will feel like we have learned something, but deep down we know that the real tragedy of what we saw is that poverty imposes harsh disadvantages, and that they can be deadly and dehumanizing on a massive scale.
And we didn't need the cantankerous Katrina to tell us that. We could feel that in our souls.
Terence Samuel is the chief congressional correspondent for U.S. News & World Report. His column about politics appears each week in the Prospect's online edition.
