4 years ago today Katrina made landfall. I've been thinking and thinking about what to write about it this year. I saw a show on the Weather Channel where newsman Brian Williams talked about his time in NOLA after the storm. They showed a clip of him from shortly afterward saying that if we in the United States didn't have a serious discussion about the racism and classism exposed by the storm than the media will have failed us.
Where is that discussion now? I could write a post about that.
Last night Anderson Cooper did a special "4 years later" segment on CNN. When talking about the aftermath he actually stated as fact that the tragedy was met with "government indifference." Indeed. I could write a post about that.
I've thought about equating the problems everyone ran into with insurance to the health care crisis. Home insurance companies were exposed as phonies over and over again as they denied claims and raised costs and turned their backs on their clients. Just as health insurance companies do to the sick and dying day in and day out. I could write a post about that.
But frankly, I don't have it in me this week to craft that sort of well thought out post.
So I will just say that I am here, remembering the fear, the terror and the sorrow. I have not forgotten. I know that the recovery is not over. Not in NOLA, and not in our country. Katrina exposed deep, deep problems in the way our country is run. We need to shore up not just the levees of New Orleans, but the levees of justice in America.
*Photo taken on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain earlier this week. 4 years ago that was under water.
Past Katrina Anniversary posts:
Last year I posted an edited (but still quite long) rundown of all the e-mails I sent to family and friends during our evacuation from Katrina:
Flashback 3 Years - Hurricane Katrina
Two years ago I wrote a love letter to New Orleans. It still stands as one of my favorite posts:
I Know What it Means to Love New Orleans
7 comments:
In saying so little in this post, you've spoken volumes.
Beautiful.
beautiful. We're in the same place we were four years ago. People who had come over for their holiday were shell shocked. I remember a couple saying that they finally decided that they could sit in the dark and guard their home or just leave for the holiday they had planned. I thought they were very brave and very smart. Hey, PM-- I got your invite just as I was leaving. I will be checking in after we fly back. Thanks for thinking of me.
I'll have to do some archive diving and read your past posts. It was a terrible event.
I agree with Anjali...
Great post, Mama.
I remember.
It's good to remember.
I remember that I was recovering from surgery in which I was banished to the upstairs for 2 weeks. No stairs. No lifting a finger. I never watched TV, but wanted to watch that. I had to turn it off because I thought the media was sensationalizing it. It made me sick that lives and livelihoods were at stake, and it was treated as a dramatic news story, not real life. I had to turn it off and read about it.
Good correlation between home insurance and health insurance companies. Why do people still not get it?
what katrina DID do, however, was make people more aware of the affect of their actions on the environment. it was an awful, awful tragedy, and yet i think we did learn something from it about what is coming if we don't start taking care of the earth.
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