DON'T FORGET KATRINA. With all the mudslinging and war talk that has dominated this mid-term campaign, the Bush administration's Gulf Coast debacle has been forced into the background, except for the occasional use of the name "Katrina" as a synonym for ineptitude (as in John Kerry's description of the president's "Katrina foreign policy"). Yet Katrina is not simply the story of incompetence; it is many stories, stories of race, class, heritage, and abandonment. And while the failure of the Republican Congress to address devastation wrought by disaster, incompetence, and indifference should indeed be a serious campaign issue on a national scale, we may all find ourselves staring hard at our shoes when it is brought to our attention that most of us have forgotten the Gulf, as well. In today's New York Times, a jarring reminder comes in this article by Adam Nossiter, which describes the fate of high school students living virtually on their own, separated from parents who have found themselves trapped by circumstances in the cities to which they fled after the storm. Nossiter paints a picture of a school plagued by extreme violence, and young people contemptuous of authority. Of the 775 students in McDonogh High, says the principal, nearly a fifth live without their parents, often with relatives who are barely adults themselves. Fewer than half of New Orleans' schools have reopened, Nossiter explains. I do wish he had noted that nearly half the town's population is still missing, and little has been done to make it possible for those people to return home. (FEMA won't supply trailers to most of the homeowners in the devastated Ninth Ward, for example.) Nor does Nossiter mention the term Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, something from which many of these students surely suffer.
--Adele M. Stan
