Katrina a Year In: A Remembrance from New York

As we come up on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, it’s more important than ever that we follow the stories of people dislocated and lost, whose lives were turned upside down and shaken out over a wide area outside a flooded city and coast. Much more so than here in New York after September 11, affected residents of New Orleans and the Gulf are left with little of what they knew to be their cities and their lives.

While the light no longer shines so bright on them, I know there are thousands, probably tens of thousands, and maybe even more people looking to put the pieces of their world back together today. I know this because I experienced a very small version of what they must be going through.

After September of 2001, many of us in New York were without jobs, clients, workplaces, and left having to reconstruct some version of what we did to get by in the world. Old patterns of social and economic life were forever altered or torn apart. The good news was, we had the nation’s support and indulgence. We had a continuing focus on making us whole again, which helped make a hard time possible to surmount.

My business was mostly gone, but I had a support network. Personally, I will always remember two volunteer marketing specialists, Keren and Richard, who spent an hour a week with two of us for a year. They spent time learning what we did producing video and how our businesses used to work. Once they understood our businesses, they started educating us. They spent endless hours going painstakingly over how to find new clients, how to make up a good brochure and a website, how to build appropriate materials for different kinds of project prospects. They laid out all the marketing nuts and bolts of starting out again in a business that I used to know and run without thinking about it much.

It was slow coming back. The Small Business Administration helped with a loan. My parents helped. Still, there were months when nothing happened but the ticking of the clock— and the disappearance of rent money. It was frightening to realize that the bottom could just fall out of your economic life and that it was no one’s major concern but your own. It was harder to go through in a time when you knew that the premise of American life had changed, that we were not bound together in a promise that FDR had made with the people seventy years ago. Our new Administration didn’t want the rich suffering alongside the rest of us, so our problems weren’t their concern. They got tax cuts.

Still, here in New York, we were missing lives, an iconic, but small part of the city’s infrastructure, and a significant, but measurable portion of the Big Apple’s economy. We had support. We had a huge area that was less affected around us. In New Orleans and parts of the Gulf Coast, people are without so much more than we lost. And for them, every day that the country has forgotten their plight is another day of searching for what makes a community whole.

Just setting aside for a moment those who lost everything, the families who will never see their kin again, there are countless people who are still without a real home. Imagine your community torn asunder and you being left someplace else, where you don’t know anyone, looking for work among people who aren’t living with your desperate reality. Imagine being a stranger among them, without a job or a community of the people you’ve come to know throughout your life. Imagine that the television doesn’t blare out your plight every day to the country, saying how hard your situation is. It’s no longer news to anyone but you that life as you knew it is gone for good. Oh yeah, and add to that the racism and class division that hits poor people of color (a huge percentage of those affected) in America every day, even when you’re not struggling to get out from under a hurricane.

These are the people who I think about when I think about a year having passed soon since Katrina hit their city and coast. These are the stories I hope my friend Sam Pollard has captured on film and video with Spike Lee in their documentary. These are the folks who need our attention and our respect. We as a country need to remember the plight of a city that didn’t get hit by terrorists, but by the weight of economic, political, and racial barriers, all pressing down on them while nature washed over them in a fury.

It’s been almost a year, but it’ll be a lot longer before many can move on. Let’s remember them this year too.

Comments

[Intrepid Liberal Journal]

I'm still trying to wrap my brain around Armitage as the leaker. Novak made a point on Meet the Press of pressuring his source and saying the time had long past for him to acknowledge his identity. To pressure a source so publicly seems to violate journalist ethics but from Novak that's hardly a surprise.