Rasheeda Bhagat

THE death and devastation caused in New Orleans — it is estimated that thousands of people have died in what Americans are increasingly calling "our own Tsunami" — are heart-rending. The Louisiana State Governor, Ms Kathleen Blanco, said on Saturday that she expects the death toll to go into thousands.

As a tardy local, State and Federal administration — almost in that order — swung into action to rescue people and reach food and medical aid to them and remove bodies and the debris, an Associated Press report said that no one knew how many had survived and how many had died "waiting to be rescued. But the bodies are everywhere; hidden in attics, floating among the ruined city, crumpled on wheelchairs, abandoned on highways."

On the face of it, a time of such intense human tragedy is hardly right to take anyone to task, but the manner in which the US President, Mr George W. Bush, who more than any other American President before him is out to reform the world, has reacted to this tragedy is abysmal.

Stung by criticism from his own people that he did too little too late and that he had no business to be holidaying on his Texas ranch while the people of New Orleans were devastated by hurricane Katrina, he set out on Monday evening on his second trip to the region in three days to take a look at the aftermath of the hurricane's fury in Louisiana and Mississippi.

As always, Mr Bush is high on rhetoric. Of course, it is expected that a leader must comfort his people at times of great tragedy. But, surely, Mr Bush's words would have rung hollow to the victims of the storm's fury when he thundered at the emergency operations centre in Baton Rouge, Louisiana: "We're going to show the world once again that not only we will survive, but we'll be stronger and better for it, when it's all said and done, that amidst this darkness, there is light."

One wonders how these words were received by the victims who were marooned for days on the tops of buildings before they could be rescued; or those who saw loved ones breathe their last as they waited desperately for emergency medical aid to reach them; or, worse, those who saw their lifetime's earnings being looted by armed criminals as the law and order situation simply collapsed.

The images of the way the world's only superpower tackled the crisis are pathetic to say the least. This tragedy, though different from 9/11, has raised several issues on an America divided not only along racial lines but also class lines; black versus white, and the rich and powerful versus the poor and weak. Americans themselves are debating whether the havoc wrought by Katrina would be remembered as the worst natural disaster in the country's history or the worst response of its administration.

Striking a poignant note, the cover story of last week's Time magazine begins thus: "New Orleans lives by the water and fights it, a sand-castle set on a sponge nine feet below sea level, where people made music from heartache, named their drinks for hurricanes and joked that one day you'd be able to tour the city by gondola."

While nature's fury does not discriminate across race or class, the larger issue that torments Americans, more than any other nationals who have been following this tragedy, is how their nation continues to make a difference between the blacks and the whites, the rich and the poor. As the administration failed to move in quickly to maintain law and order, and looting broke out, some attempts were indeed made to find a justification for what happened.

The Time article said: "A city built by rum-runners, slave traders and pirates was never going to play by anyone's rules or plan for the future."

This comes as a shock. For we're not talking about the armed gangs that roamed the streets of Baghdad for months after the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq, looting, killing and terrorising the citizens. Nor of some obscure Asian or African nation that is so poor and backward that violence and brawn power reign supreme there. This is supposed to be the richest nation in the world... sorry, the "civilised world" as Mr Bush never tires of telling us. A nation that has set itself the ambitious goal of "reforming" the world, particularly West Asia, where it wants "democracy" to be restored in Iraq so that people can enjoy "freedom"; Iran stripped of its nuclear capabilities so that the rest of the world can feel "secure", and so on.

And yet there were any number of stories and pictures that made a specific point of showing that those who were looting were Afro-American; a foreign agency photographer — a white man — came under intense fire for two of his pictures showing people wading through chest deep water carrying bread and other grocery items.

Caption 1, for the picture with the dark-skinned person, read: "A young man walks through chest-deep flood water after looting a grocery store in New Orleans".

Caption 2, for the frame depicting two light-skinned persons, said: "Two residents wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store..."

But the bright side of this story is that Americans, including the media, which had to show its patriotic side in the aftermath of 9/11, and the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, made no attempts to whitewash the murky story.

A New York Times article titled "Across US, outrage at response" quoted Mr David Vitter, Louisiana's Republican Senator, giving the federal government "an F for its handling of the whirlwind after the storm."

And Representative Elijah E. Cummings, Democrat from Maryland and former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, declared: "We cannot allow it to be said that the difference between those who lived and those who died" amounted to "nothing more than poverty, age or skin colour."

Reflecting the public mood of shame and disbelief at the aftermath, the article quoted Mr David Herbert Donald, a retired Harvard historian, saying: "It really makes us look very much like Bangladesh or Baghdad. I'm 84 years old. I've been around a long time, but I've never seen anything like this."

And then, in the midst of all the gloom, just as we saw in Mumbai after the 1992 bomb blasts, when people queued up at hospitals to donate blood, in this disaster too, one got glimpses of the nobler side of human nature.

Noting how human nature never ceases to surprise, the Time article said: "Stripped of safety and comfort, survivors made their choices: greed, mercy, mischief, gallantry, depravity or a surrender to despair. So, nurses hand-pumped the ventilators of dying patients after the generators and then the batteries failed, while outside the hospital, snipers fired at ambulances, and invading looters with guns demanded that doctors turn over whatever drugs they had. Hijackers shot at the tyres of fleeing vehicles, slapped the spares on after the owners escaped and drove the cars away themselves. Some police officers battled the looters; others joined them."

Churches too got into the act, as did the Red Cross disaster volunteers, preparing 5 lakh hot meals a day. "I just had a gentleman walk in off the street and write a $10,000 cheque," said a Red Cross director in Massachusetts.

She'd never seen him before; he had no family down there. He just said it seemed the right thing to do," noted the article.

And then we Indians had our own moment of pride; when our Prime Minister, who had said `No, thanks' to US government aid in the aftermath of the tsunami devastation, announced a donation of $5 million to the American Red Cross.

But, then, the indomitable American film-maker and Bush-baiter, Michael Moore, deserves the last word.

On September 2, in an open letter to his President, he asked: "Any idea where all our helicopters are? It is Day 5 of Hurricane Katrina and thousands remain stranded in New Orleans and need to be airlifted. Where on earth could you have misplaced all our military choppers? Do you need help finding them? I once lost my car in a Sears parking-lot. Man, was that a drag. Also, any idea where all our national guard soldiers are? We could really use them right now for the type of thing they signed up to do like helping with national disasters. How come they weren't there to begin with?"

Can one put it any better?

(Response may be sent to rasheeda@thehindu.co.in)

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