Two levees failed in New Orleans last week.
The first allowed hurricane-churned waters from the Gulf of Mexico to deluge the famous old city and roil through houses, businesses, cars, graveyards, schools, playgrounds and churches. The water chased living things out or up. In some cases, it swallowed them whole.
What the flooding’s final toll will be in terms of human lives is too terrible to even contemplate. But in the days and maybe weeks to come, we will have to do more than imagine it; we will have to behold it. As if last week’s horror show was not enough.
The second levee that was breached was the one that had, for always, held back the realities of rank poverty, the abuses it commits and the results of chronic negligence. What came flowing out from behind that embankment were hordes of people too poor to even save their own lives.
Observers have noted that this was a case of class neglect more than of racism. But, just like 100 years ago, if you’re talking about a poor people nowadays, you’re talking black or brown. That’s a product of social policy and behavior, not an accident of nature.
Though most of us watched from a safe distance, our hearts were still in trouble. The pain of betrayal and the fire of outrage seared through us over and over again, yet we could not pull away from the live television coverage and were captivated by the hundreds of infuriating, heartbreaking and nerve-wracking images from New Orleans.
For most black Americans, that was us down there held hostage by a river of fetid, putrid water with its human waste and corpses and garbage and chemicals.
That was us clinging to the debydrated babies and famished toddlers; us praying as the old woman’s leg continued to swell; us screaming out as the teenager with asthma gasped for life; us wondering why the troops and cops could bring guns and nightsticks but not bottles of water.
Whether we were New Orleanians or not -- whether we’d ever been there or not -- was beside the point. As black Americans, we identified with the brothers and sisters holding onto false promises and being fed nothing for days and days but lame excuses.
That was nearly 400 years of being treated as second class and second rate, of being treated like a people whose needs are thought to be less urgent and less important than other folks’, of being expected to roll with the punches, of having to wait and being urged to trust in those who have repeatedly failed us, and of being told to “get over it” once the worst of the storm has passed.
That’s what came across the levee last week: The modern produce of a timeless social travesty.
For me, one of the most gripping photographs was snapped by an Associated Press photographer on Thursday outside the New Orleans convention center. In it, an old man with dry but wavy gray hair sits crumpled in a lawn chair. His light slacks and white undershirt are stained. His head is bowed and resting on his left arm. His eyes are closed. He is dead.
From appearances, the man was probably in his 70s or 80s, maybe older, so he would have been a grown man when the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 were passed. He would have known Jim Crow first-hand. He would have been shut out or turned away from jobs, housing, restaurants, swimming pools, movie theaters, libraries -- provided he even had the heart to try. I imagine he might have been called “boy” long after he became a husband and father.
And now, in his golden years, his weary old body sat rotting in the Dixie heat. Not even dignity in death for that poor soul.
Some apologists are counseling tolerance, saying “don’t blame Bush.”
Too late. The administration didn’t make the hurricane, but it can be blamed for the fact that so many people were too poor to save themselves and that, when they couldn’t, the mighty federal government -- so self-assured and intrepid in saving the people of Iraq –- couldn’t figure out how to save the people of New Orleans.
So, make that three levees that failed. The third was the illusion that George W. Bush is competent and will keep Americans safe.
