BLAME IS NOT A GAME
"Blame game.” “Finger-pointing.” “He said-she said.” “Guilt-tripping.” “Time to move on.” A French collaborator with the Nazis who was finally brought to trial decades after his crimes had been committed is reported to have said, “I’ve forgotten about all that. Why can’t they?” The list goes on. It is what the perpetrators of harm say to their victims when they can’t say “I’m sorry” and can’t even figure out how to say “I’ll do better next time.”
A very dear friend of mine whom I shall call Lou has nothing but scorn for President Bush, on whose watch this mess happened. Bush set up FEMA to fail, Lou says. He is allowing Brown to be scapegoated, but Brown was his choice for the job in the first place. But Lou believes the local and state authorities are getting a really bad rap for having failed to set up an evacuation plan for New Orleanians without cars. “It couldn’t have been done,” he says. “Mayor Nagin did the best anybody could have done in a situation nobody else has ever confronted at all. We need to stop hitting him over the head. There was no way the poor could have been evacuated, and trying just would have cost more lives.”
So the poor of New Orleans drowned and starved so that the middle class could live? Let’s think about that. If somebody came to me and said, “There’s going to be a hazmat leakage in an hour. We can choose between trying to evacuate the folks in your South Side Chicago neighborhood, which probably won’t work very well, or we can concentrate on keeping Winnetka and Naperville safe, which probably will. There’s no way we can do both. Are you willing to give up your life and the lives of those you love for the suburbanites?” what would I say? What would any of us say? Probably something like “Get the **** out of my doorway and let us get out of here!” There are people whose job it is to give up their lives so that others might live. Firefighters, police officers, soldiers, doctors, nurses, paramedics, sometimes teachers and even telephone operators and lighthouse operators. When they take jobs like that, they know the obligations that go with it. So do their families. But the rest of us, ordinary citizens, have no such obligation. We have the right to preserve our own lives and the duty to preserve the lives of our families, by any means necessary.
So of course, the authorities in New Orleans, assuming they had actually made such a rational calculation of who could live and who could die in the hypothetical Hurricane Pam, knew better than to tell the people on the wrong end of it, in advance, that they had drawn the short straw. Maybe that was the right choice. The greatest good of the greatest number. But now they are going to have to deal with the consequences of those same people knowing that they were written off in advance of the disaster. However rational and utilitarian the reasons, the poor of New Orleans now know that the social contract was always null and void for them.
What about the rest of the citizens of New Orleans, the 80% who benefited from the extraordinary evacuation planning for auto traffic and got out with their families, their pets, and at least the most essential of their belongings? Are they worried about trying to go back and live with those with whose danger and suffering their own safety was purchased? I would be.
That’s not a new problem, of course. The most salient example of it in living memory is probably the reaction of Congress and the chattering classes to the anticipated return of the soldiers who had fought World War II. Sixteen million Americans fought in that war. Most of them would be returning home at roughly the same time. They had seen and done things no one should have to live remembering. They were young, strong, trained in the use of weapons, and capable of shedding blood. And, the civilian authorities worried, maybe they were also angry at those who had sat home and reaped the benefit of their suffering. Situations like this are what revolutions are made of.
So Congress came up with what turned out to be an absolutely brilliant solution, what was later titled the GI Bill of Rights. It provided, for all those who had served in the armed forces during World War II (and later on, in Korea) full tuition plus a living stipend for college and post-college education; medical care; and low interest home loans. An entire generation of veterans became the first in their families to go to college and own their own homes. An entire generation was moved into the middle class. The prosperity of the 1950s and early 1960s was built on the GI Bill. It was the closest this country has ever come to socialism.
Maybe this is what we owe the veterans of Hurricane Katrina. Maybe this is what it will take to re-establish the social contract with those who drew the short straw: a Katrina Bill of Rights.
A very dear friend of mine whom I shall call Lou has nothing but scorn for President Bush, on whose watch this mess happened. Bush set up FEMA to fail, Lou says. He is allowing Brown to be scapegoated, but Brown was his choice for the job in the first place. But Lou believes the local and state authorities are getting a really bad rap for having failed to set up an evacuation plan for New Orleanians without cars. “It couldn’t have been done,” he says. “Mayor Nagin did the best anybody could have done in a situation nobody else has ever confronted at all. We need to stop hitting him over the head. There was no way the poor could have been evacuated, and trying just would have cost more lives.”
So the poor of New Orleans drowned and starved so that the middle class could live? Let’s think about that. If somebody came to me and said, “There’s going to be a hazmat leakage in an hour. We can choose between trying to evacuate the folks in your South Side Chicago neighborhood, which probably won’t work very well, or we can concentrate on keeping Winnetka and Naperville safe, which probably will. There’s no way we can do both. Are you willing to give up your life and the lives of those you love for the suburbanites?” what would I say? What would any of us say? Probably something like “Get the **** out of my doorway and let us get out of here!” There are people whose job it is to give up their lives so that others might live. Firefighters, police officers, soldiers, doctors, nurses, paramedics, sometimes teachers and even telephone operators and lighthouse operators. When they take jobs like that, they know the obligations that go with it. So do their families. But the rest of us, ordinary citizens, have no such obligation. We have the right to preserve our own lives and the duty to preserve the lives of our families, by any means necessary.
So of course, the authorities in New Orleans, assuming they had actually made such a rational calculation of who could live and who could die in the hypothetical Hurricane Pam, knew better than to tell the people on the wrong end of it, in advance, that they had drawn the short straw. Maybe that was the right choice. The greatest good of the greatest number. But now they are going to have to deal with the consequences of those same people knowing that they were written off in advance of the disaster. However rational and utilitarian the reasons, the poor of New Orleans now know that the social contract was always null and void for them.
What about the rest of the citizens of New Orleans, the 80% who benefited from the extraordinary evacuation planning for auto traffic and got out with their families, their pets, and at least the most essential of their belongings? Are they worried about trying to go back and live with those with whose danger and suffering their own safety was purchased? I would be.
That’s not a new problem, of course. The most salient example of it in living memory is probably the reaction of Congress and the chattering classes to the anticipated return of the soldiers who had fought World War II. Sixteen million Americans fought in that war. Most of them would be returning home at roughly the same time. They had seen and done things no one should have to live remembering. They were young, strong, trained in the use of weapons, and capable of shedding blood. And, the civilian authorities worried, maybe they were also angry at those who had sat home and reaped the benefit of their suffering. Situations like this are what revolutions are made of.
So Congress came up with what turned out to be an absolutely brilliant solution, what was later titled the GI Bill of Rights. It provided, for all those who had served in the armed forces during World War II (and later on, in Korea) full tuition plus a living stipend for college and post-college education; medical care; and low interest home loans. An entire generation of veterans became the first in their families to go to college and own their own homes. An entire generation was moved into the middle class. The prosperity of the 1950s and early 1960s was built on the GI Bill. It was the closest this country has ever come to socialism.
Maybe this is what we owe the veterans of Hurricane Katrina. Maybe this is what it will take to re-establish the social contract with those who drew the short straw: a Katrina Bill of Rights.
posted by WiredSisters at 9:41 AM
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