The Senate H.E.L.P. Committee (Health, Education, Labor and Pensions) has been requesting input on Katrina reconstruction. The deadline was changed from Friday 9/9 to Monday, 9/12 (but presume 9/11, by the end of today) to allow more input. I don't know if DUers are aware of this. It's a great opportunity to help influence the treatment of survivors and the fate of the Gulf coast.
The email for public input is listed below. These emails are going to start being reviewed by committee staff tomorrow (Mon, 9/12). I heard about this on a CNN radio rebroadcast of the Senate H.E.L.P. Committee roundtable (of disaster experts) on 9/8, but could not get this posted until now.
Email: katrina_comments@help.senate.gov
Senate H.E.L.P. website:
http://help.senate.gov/(The ranking Democrat is Sen. Edward Kennedy.)
Here's what I'm sending them:
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Subject line: Healing the racial divide--a national apology; goal of aid to preserve communities/cultures
To: Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions
Re: Katrina - healing the racial divide, and preserving cultural heritage and communities
Date: 9/11/05
Via email to: katrina_comments@help.senate.gov
Ref:
http://help.senate.gov/From: _________
To the U.S. Senate H.E.L.P. Committee:
The best thing that could happen for the survivors of Hurricane Katrina, and for the country, are the resignations of George Bush and Dick Cheney, firing of the top echelons of FEMA, reconstruction of the old FEMA as an independent agency working for the public interest, and cancellation of all contracts that have been awarded by the Bush regime. But since the current Congress is not likely to recommend what is in the best interests of the country, I urge the Senate H.E.L.P. Committee to, at the very least, address the following two top priority issues with positive action: 1) healing the racial divide with an apology from the nation to African-Americans and to other poor victims of our murderous neglect, and 2) setting the goal of government aid as restoration of communities and cultures, not dispersal and destruction.
Healing the racial divide: an apology is in order
Many people—especially African-Americans—feel, with considerable just cause, that, if white-skinned people had been trapped in the Superdome and at the Convention Center with no food, no water, and no medical help, the country would have moved heaven and earth to reach them. The murderous neglect that the Bush/Cheney FEMA inflicted on those stranded people REQUIRES AN APOLOGY FROM THE NATION. It would be edifying and proper if the apology came from the White House perpetrators of this crime. Since that is not very likely, the Senate Committee could fill the moral void by BEGINNING its report with such an apology, and also by encouraging a national effort of some kind—perhaps a period of mourning, or a large event in DC—framed as an apology primarily to black citizens.
This is not practical help, to be sure—which of course is also critically needed. But more is at stake here. The spirit of our nation as a fair-minded people is at serious risk. Also at serious risk is the ability of the worst-hit victims to recover their mental, emotional and spiritual strength. I think an apology should be the FIRST ORDER OF BUSINESS of the Senate Committee, on Page One of its report.
Practical help: setting the cultural goals of government aid—restoration, not dispersal and destruction
Practical help and healing the racial divide and other wounds are related. For instance, on September 8, 2005, I heard, on a CNN broadcast of the Senate H.E.L.P. Roundtable on Katrina, a white male educator from Texas assert that the student evacuees that his district were helping did not want to return to their homes. Following this, a black female educator from Jefferson Parish, choked with tears, stated her belief that people in fact do want to return to their homes, and laid out plans for how this could be quickly done--how to rebuild the local communities by immediately organizing temporary living facilities—little towns—in parks, schools and other public areas—and quickly reopening schools, as the centers and hearts of communities.
I perceived the white male educator from Texas as speaking for the Bush regime, which wants poor blacks permanently cleared out of New Orleans. I did not believe his assertion that the students who were evacuated to Texas do not want to go home, nor did I believe his rosy picture of their reception in Texas schools and communities. And I perceived the black woman educator as much more in tune with the real desires of the displaced people, and as a heart-filled visionary for how these broken communities can be put back together.
I did not catch their names—and I apologize for describing these two speakers in terms of race and sex, without using their names. But I truly believe that who they are, and the impressions they gave of the situation, are not unrelated.
The black woman educator also spoke of the inequities in the school system—I presume she meant inequities based on race and wealth—and that the rebuilding of these communities should include goals that address those inequities.
The white male educator did have the grace to admit that the evacuated students might change their minds about not wanting to go home. But does this man really have any conception of the DOUBLE trauma of being black and poor AND seeing other black and poor people abandoned in a disaster and left to rot and die? His help to these students needs to be commended, but his insensitivity to the “diaspora” that is occurring here is amazing.
This is is not just a matter of body counts and of horrendous and murderous neglect. A treasure trove of black culture and tradition has been decimated, and the carriers and inheritors of this tradition—those who survived—are now being bussed, or flown, or railroaded away from their historical communities. It’s as if Harlem had been nuked—or, for Europeans, Paris or Rome. While the culture of New Orleans may not involve artifacts such as paintings and cathedrals, as much as it involves, say, music and languages—less tangible forms of culture—it is no less a precious heritage, and, in this case, it is a heritage that survives within the people and communities that grew up and evolved, over many centuries, on this particular ground.
Every effort needs to be made—and all practical help needs to be aimed at—RESTORING those communities. Individuals may do what they want to, and go where they wish, but the government must not ENCOURAGE the loss of New Orleans and other affected cultures. Government policy MUST BE restoration, return, reconstruction, renewal—not dispersal and loss of these communities.
There is considerable evidence already of mistreatment of poor evacuees—even after the horrors of the Superdome and the Convention Center. People packed into busses who have no idea what their destination is, or what their fate will be. People held in detention-like accommodations. People who have been violently severed from everything they know, and are told they must not return, they cannot return. And there are ominous signs of potential violent removal of those who will not leave. I heard of an elderly woman called “Momma D,” who is the matriarch of her New Orleans neighborhood, saying she will not leave. She sounds like exactly the kind of person I am thinking of—the carrier of culture, the holder of tradition, the bearer of history in her person—in her mind, in her memory, in her language, and in her intimate web of community connections. We must not disregard such cultural, community and family values. We must hold them as our first priority in every action that we, as a society and as a government, take.*
The Jefferson Parish educator was correct that inequities must be addressed in reconstruction work. Nobody wants to reproduce poverty or racism (or no one in their right minds.) But there is a sensitive demarcation that must be drawn between correcting injustice and encouraging the destruction of a culture. And the people who can make that important distinction are the people like this Jefferson Parish educator, who live there, and who know and love their communities—not distant government bureaucrats, or the representatives of other states and other cultures (such as the Texas educator), or the CEOs of Halliburton, Bechtel and other war profiteers, who have circled this Gulf coast disaster like vultures, bent upon looting the American people once again, and on reiterating on American soil the cultural disaster that they and the Bush regime have created in Iraq.
I think we have to understand WHAT was lost, before we can provide the full measure of help that is needed, and before we can provide the RIGHT KIND OF HELP. The students who were evacuated to Texas, for instance, did not just lose relatives and friends in horrendous circumstances; they did not just lose financial support; they did not just lose all their material possessions; they did not just lose their homes, their schools, their churches, their old meeting places, their favorite haunts, and all the intangible connections and touchstones of any community. They did not just lose these obvious things. They lost the CONTINUITY of a very old and established culture, and many of them may also have lost FAITH IN AMERICA, as all of our promises of equity and fair treatment crumbled before their very eyes. Certainly many of them knew something about the hypocrisy of those promises. But never before was that hypocrisy demonstrated with such cruelty, or, for the dead, with such finality.
So, here is the program:
1. Restore the faith of the victims, and of all Americans, in our progressive, multi-cultural society, by a national apology to the African-American community and to all victims of this disaster, especially the poor.
2. Restore the local affected communities by empowering and funding LOCAL people.
3. Restore the local affected cultures by encouraging and assisting quick return, and also by specific programs of oral and other history to preserve knowledge of the disaster, and from BEFORE the disaster.
4. Design all reconstruction projects for maximum benefit to LOCAL workers and entrepreneurs; exclude big corporations and chains as much as possible.
5. DO NOT PERMIT anyone in FEMA who had anything to do with FEMA’s failures in this disaster, or anyone in the Bush regime, on any of its related contractors, to control disaster aid or reconstruction.
Some have compared this disaster to 9/11 or to Chernobyl. It is worse than those. It didn’t just kill people. It killed our humanity. It didn’t just destroy an American city. It killed the American dream of fairness and equitable treatment, and opportunity for all. Our humanity, our compassion and our dreams are more important than any material possession. And it it is those things that we must rekindle--and give new birth to--as best we can, in the course of providing practical help.
When over 100,000 innocent Iraqis were slaughtered by U.S. Bombs in March 2003, this Congress did nothing, said nothing. When thousands of black citizens—some have estimated a million nationwide—were denied the right to vote in the 2004 election, this Congress did nothing, said nothing. Now this racist and murderous behavior has come home to us in a very concrete and graphic way, with the most vulnerable among us-- old people, babies--dying of dehydration, starvation and diabolical neglect. How much more evidence do we need that racism and classism violate our humanity and our highest spiritual values? How much more evidence do we need that we, as a nation, have gone astray?
We must apologize to African-Americans and to the poor. We must show these victims of murderous neglect that we value who they are, and were, and that we will not permit the precious cultural heritage of New Orleans and the Gulf coast to perish from the earth.
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* “Momma D” was mentioned by a New Orleans rescuer in an interview by MSNBC or CNN radio, circa 9/10/05.
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