Letters

From looting to poverty to the world's response, readers weigh in on the Katrina disaster.

Sep 1, 2005 | [Read Salon's full coverage of Hurricane Katrina.]

My mother used to say that the less we have, the more it means to us. Her words come to mind as I peruse accounts of Katrina's damage and learn that the scope of destruction could have been minimized. Almost everybody touched by the power of that hurricane has lost their entire lives; they have been stripped down, reduced to almost nothing.

Like me, you may wonder why so many images of the hurricane victims you have seen, especially in New Orleans, have been of blacks or African-Americans. Has our media suddenly become a paragon of equal representation? What we have in New Orleans is a several hundred years-old problem displaying its gory consequences before our very eyes, which no one can say they didn't see coming.

From the U.S. Census, here is a pre-Katrina breakdown of the per-capita income in New Orleans by race:

White (28 percent of population) -- $31,971
Latino (3 percent of the population) -- $16,151
Black (67 percent) -- $11,332

Those who have lived in or visited New Orleans may already be aware of these facts by inference. In one of the cities where blacks are most congregated (blacks form only 12 percent of the U.S. population as a whole), they are already devastated by intense racism and hyper-segregation, with severe financial ramifications.

You would have noticed during your visit to the former principal slave port, sprawling mansions on one side of the street and shacks on the other. This is where blacks invented jazz -- African-American music refined into the purest expression of freedom to date.

It is more than devastating, more than cruel that the majority of those most harmed in New Orleans are the blacks who had no way to get out and the fewest possessions of all. According to my mother, they have lost the most.

-- Eseohe Arhebamen

I am a resident of a northern suburb of Baton Rouge, which wasn't even really touched by Katrina, with the exception of high winds, but nonetheless I have a few interesting points that I feel people should leave with relative to Katrina.

In the week prior to Katrina hitting, Louisiana experienced its hottest weather in a few years. It was hot as hell! Normally Louisiana is hot, and the humidity makes it feel even stickier and worse, but nonetheless the past week was unprecedented in terms of pure heat. When you factor in a slow-moving hurricane over water, you get a hurricane approaching typhoon levels.

Secondly, the weather guys were very confusing and vague, leaving people in Louisiana thinking the storm would go further east and people in Alabama, Florida and Mississippi thinking it would go further west. Their cone of uncertainty stretched as far west as Lake Charles, La., which is very close to Texas, all the way through Tallahassee, Fla.

Also, I would like to make this point (some may think I am an asshole for piling on at this point, but honesty is honesty no matter its timing) -- the management of this hurricane was just plain terrible. New Orleans wasn't given a mandatory evacuation until roughly 20 hours before the hurricane hit land. Factor almost 600,000 people evacuating and thus you have many people still in New Orleans facing terrible floods.

Also, there have been many doomsday predictions over the last five years about this sort of scenario. I specifically remembering a segment on "NOW With Bill Moyers" about what would happen if a Category 3 or higher directly hit New Orleans. More should have been done, not just to get people out of New Orleans and areas lower, but to get the general public of Louisiana who don't watch PBS or read Salon to understand the potential dangers, or just get out of the mind-set that Louisiana is well-positioned enough to avoid getting get hit hard.

Lastly, I would like to say specifically to our National Guardsmen in Iraq: I truly wish you were here to do the job you were meant to do, as we need you and miss you.

-- Kevin Criss

As a New Orleanian, I want to thank Salon.com. I am glad that you are brave enough to start asking difficult questions about this disaster, and appreciate your unwillingness to portray this as merely a capricious natural disaster. In fact, I think you would do very well to pursue the juxtaposition of New York's 9/11 to New Orleans' Katrina.

New Orleans has always had something to offer the rest of the United States and the rest of the world, and only with Mayor Nagin has the rest of the country started listening. New Orleans has figured out a way to be commercialistic instead of capitalistic. It is the fourth densest urbanized area in the U.S. It has the most historic structures of any city. It is one of the most integrated cities -- ethnically and socioeconomically - per census tract in the entire country. Among the 40 largest cities in the country, its cost of living is third lowest, and the average cost of a house is less than a third of what it is in San Francisco.

Sept. 11 was an event that lent itself quite facilely to the purposes of ideologues. Typically, New Orleans cannot easily fit a prefabricated agenda, even in the aftermath of a hurricane.

Do not mourn for New Orleans. It is a city that willed herself out of the waters of the Mississippi, and will do so again. What I ask is that we continue to ask the much more difficult questions -- not even about global warming, but about why, when over a million people evacuated, the vast majority of those left behind were those citizens in the great need? Why, in the face of such difficulty in convincing the world to fight terrorism and global warming, the concrete solutions to problems that have immediate effects on millions of people --pumping stations, coastal restoration, emergency planning -- are consistently eschewed and, worse, disdained?

What the residents of New Orleans ultimately need is for you to continue advocating on issues that are probably no better manifested than in the Crescent City -- and which the rest of the country might do well to heed.

Wish us good luck! And if anyone can show me how to mount some drywall ... I can assure you that Mardi Gras will be celebrated this year...

-- Jeffrey Schwartz

New Orleans is a dead city -- it just doesn't know it yet. There is not an investor, mortgage company or insurance executive who will gamble a single penny on rebuilding a city that sits 6 feet below sea level. No matter how strong they rebuild the levees or reinforce the pumps, the city will not be rebuilt.

We have just witnessed a unique act in human history: the death of a city.

-- Tom Neven

While the facts of Sidney Blumenthal's article may be true and certainly appalling, the choice to run it at a time when there is a humanitarian crisis is equally distasteful. There are folks on the ground who are risking their lives to save others within a tiny window before disease and total anarchy sets in. This is another war breaking out -- one against time and death. And to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, we do go to war with the army (or president) we have.

What this article says to me is that the world of political journalism truly exists in a parallel dimension, one where the idea of embarrassing and (hopefully) sinking a mediocre leader stands right there next to tragedy by turning blood, hurt and loss into capital for an argument. If you feel this strongly about this stuff, write another book, Mr. Blumenthal. You'll open a lot of eyes. But later, man. Later. You just have no idea ...

-- Nathan Feinblock

Next Page: "Thousands of people are likely to die for lack of resources to evacuate people and bring in emergency aid"

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