The Saga of Ike - part 2
I have had the experience of losing everything. Not in a hurricane but in a fire. You never know what it is really like until it happens to you. The things you don’t expect - how it takes away your sense of yourself for all your clothes to suddenly disappear, the fabric that kept you warm, folded to your shape, held your scent, identified you to your neighbors across the way. (I knew you by your red quilted jacket.)
And the things that are always at hand, your cookbook, your scissors, your hairbrush - gone. Your hand reaches out and there’s nothing there. Then there are the big things - the pictures that can never be replaced, your history ripped away from you leaving you rootless and abandoned, your children without memories. The things you love, the things that make you who you are; not the big expensive things but the little personal things that make you who you are. Gone, all gone. Multiplied by a whole community. All that is left is what we carry in our hearts. We can write and sing about it but we can never touch it again in real life. It is like when someone you love dies.
What do we, as a society, do when a whole community loses everything? Is it not relevant to look at how we deal with loss and grief?
When the word went out that Ike was going to hit Galveston, the community was divided into the haves and the have nots - have a car or have not a car (or gas money for car). The ones with the cars were directed to all available motel rooms. The ones without were herded onto buses without being told where they were going. They were taken to shelters like the convention center and the smaller community centers and high school gyms in Austin and other towns in central Texas. They were not told to bring bedding. When they got here, there were no cots, no blankets, nothing to sleep on but the hard concrete floors. A representative of the Red Cross actually said on television that first night that they did not supply cots because they didn’t want people to stay too long. This was quickly swept under the rug before the full effect of that statement sunk in and some city official said they were getting cots out to the people, which mostly they never did and then after a couple of days they turned around and kicked people out of most of the shelters (even though there were road blocks preventing them from getting back home - or what was left of it) because money-making events were scheduled and, of course, could not be cancelled. Money would be lost.
The first few days people were just dumped into these places, no bedding, no food and sometimes very little water, and definitely no adequate restrooms. There was a complete media blackout. The Austin media interviewed a couple of carefully selected evacuees but were never allowed to interview people at random or go inside the shelters. Reporter Sara Foley was assigned by her editor to board a bus taking people with special needs to Austin when a mandatory evacuation was ordered for Galveston Island. She filed news stories and blogs about the experience until she was thrown out of the shelter. This really happened. This is really scarey stuff. Read about her experiences here. Meanwhile, down in Galveston, the mayor ordered a media blackout and ordered city employees not to talk to any media. The publisher of the Galveston County Daily News said: “A news blackout will cause those people, helpless evacuees, to suffer longer. Not knowing the full story is the worst pain they face, and the city has helped prolong and make that pain greater by blocking access to news.” You can read the full story here.
I talked with some people who were staying in a small community center across the street from where I live and that is how I found out what was really happening.
As word got out, the people of Austin responded overwhelmingly through the food bank with half a million dollars and half a million pounds of food - in just two days. It’s not that the people didn’t care. It’s that the government system is set up to assert maximum control over people for the least possible expenditure of money and resources. I got the feeling that the bureaucracy has just two ways of dealing with events like this - ignore them or treat people like a prison population.
I read a Norweigan newspaper every week just to get a different perspective. The attitude of the government toward the people in Norway is totally different than it is here. Norway is a social democracy. There is an ethic of fairness built in to the system. There are instances of corruption but they are bumps in the road compared to the mountains of disdain that this government dishes out to its citizens. It is possible to have a fair, respectful government. I think I read the Norweigan newspaper just to remind myself of this.
But the Norweigan government got that way because it reflects the will of the people and at this point in our national history we have a chance to change the tune that has had so many people dancing like marionettes on the string of buy-more, consume-more, screw your neighbor. Katrina changed more than many people realize. In Texas, thousands of people opened their homes to strangers, literally. Total strangers from another culture and another place. They spontaneously brought them into their personal space and fed them and comforted them and helped them in every way they could.
Thousands more went to New Orleans to help, just as they have gone to Galveston, just as my great-grandmother did in 1900. People are basically herd animals and we will take care of our own. Our government does not reflect this. This is the change it’s time for. We can influence this change by our actions. The new path our country takes will be built by us, from the grassroots UP this time.
The least we can do for people who have lost everything is to let them know they have not lost their place in the fabric of life.
November 12th, 2008 at 6:47 am
Thanks for writing this powerful and important article.