[Mb-civic] Disaster's disquieting reality - Ellen Goodman - Boston Globe

[William Swiggard]

Disaster's disquieting reality

By Ellen Goodman  |  September 9, 2005

THIS IS THE phrase repeated again and again when Katrina broke through 
the levees of denial: ''I can't believe this is America."

The mantra of disbelief echoed from a veteran of the war in Afghanistan 
to the president of Jefferson Parish to mothers and fathers in the 
Superdome to families around their television sets: ''This doesn't 
happen here."

For days on end we watched a toxic gumbo of natural and manmade 
disasters cooking along the Gulf Coast. ''The city that care forgot" 
felt forgotten. The ''left behind" were not characters in a faith-based 
thriller but old folks, poor folks, black folks without enough money to 
pay for a ticket out of hell.

For a time, reporters called them ''refugees," as if the displaced 
citizens of the late, great city of New Orleans were Bosnians or 
Somalis. For a moment, an exhausted Brian Williams, embedded in the 
Superdome, talked about getting back to the states as if the sports 
arena were a foreign country. ''I've seen things," he said, ''I never 
thought I'd see in the United States."

Now, in the parade of plagues, flood is followed by fire and pestilence. 
Words like ''diaspora" are used to describe an exodus of biblical 
proportions. And this Sunday we will mark the anniversary of 9/11, not 
merely with a bizarre country music festival planned by the Pentagon but 
with mourning and cleaning.

It's been four years since Al Qaeda came crashing out of the blue, 
shattering the threshold of our imagination. As men flew planes into 
buildings, as innocents fell to their deaths, we were left gasping at 
our vulnerability. This year, Katrina has come out of the Gulf and left 
us gasping, not at evil but at incompetence, not at sworn enemies but at 
sworn protectors.

Forgive me if I find some comfort in the voices that expressed shock and 
shame that ''this" could happen in our own country. They were not 
shocked by the hurricane, however devastating. They were not shamed by 
the flood or even the evacuated city. The disbelief was about people 
stranded for days on rooftops, abandoned in a sports stadium, 
unprotected in hospitals, drowned in nursing homes.

The disbelief was that while ''this" happened, FEMA fiddled, a ship sat 
idle in the Gulf of Mexico with 120 sailors and 600 hospital beds, and 
the president expressed the tone-deaf optimism that Trent Lott would 
rebuild a ''fantastic" new home from his rubble: ''I'm looking forward 
to sitting on the porch."

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/09/09/disasters_disquieting_reality/
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