Revolution #014, September 18, 2005, posted at revcom.us
One of the first things we heard while traveling through Louisiana in the days shortly after Hurricane Katrina hit was that there were thousands of bodies in the streets of New Orleans. People told us that especially the neighborhoods close to Lake Pontchartrain had been overwhelmed by a surge of water, and many people couldn’t make it out. Everyone in southern Louisiana was talking about the need to get in there and try to save people. Time was critical—immediate action needed to be taken if many of the lives threatened by the flooding were to be saved.
Not much was reported in those first few days about the potential of thousands of dead bodies lying in the streets of a major U.S. city—people whose lives could have been saved if quick and decisive action had been taken. Mention of such a horrendous and unthinkable development was dismissed as the kind of second-guessing and rumor-mongering that could only worsen the situation. But on September 9, over a week and a half after the surging waters burst through the levees of Lake Pontchartrain, the New York Times reported that “the number of dead remains a looming and disturbing question. In the first indication of how many fatalities Louisiana alone might expect, Robert Johanessen, a spokesman for the state Department of Health and Hospitals, said Wednesday that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had ordered 25,000 body bags. The official death toll remained at under 100.”
Our first stop in Baton Rouge was at a center set up at a large Baptist church. I was talking to a man from the Red Cross who was supervising some of the work being done there for people from New Orleans who had been driven from their homes by Katrina and the flooding, when he suddenly broke down in tears and began sobbing uncontrollably. We sat in a quieter corner of the church lobby as he struggled to compose himself.
“I’ve been through more hurricanes in Florida than I can remember,” he told me. “I went to Indonesia after the tsunami last year. But I’ve never felt so overwhelmed as I do now.”
He told me about a young woman he had just finished talking to. She had driven in from Texas to find her grandmother, and in fact did find her in the church. He went on,
“I told her I was so happy that she had found her grandmother alive. But she just looked away from me, and told me that she had just told her grandmother that her sisters and daughter had died in the flooding.”
The scale and depth of the suffering inflicted on the people of New Orleans is incalculable. As one man from Treme told me, “There are thousands of stories here, thousands, and most of them are never going to get told.” Many of them will not get told because the people are dead. They are mainly the people who didn’t own cars, the people who didn’t have the money to get on one of the very few buses out of town, the people who felt they had to stay behind to try to connect with a loved one or friend or to look out for an old neighbor.
I sat for an hour on the banks of the Mississippi in Baton Rouge talking to a man who was aching with sadness. He told me that he had worked as a janitor in a building on Canal Street. He didn’t go in to work Sunday night as Katrina approached, and tried to talk his brother out of going to work. He said his brother thought he had to go in—he couldn’t afford to lose a day’s pay, and he couldn’t miss any more time at work after recovering from an illness. But they got separated by the storm and the flooding, and he hadn’t heard anything about what had happened to his brother. Now the man was scanning the lists of names and looking towards the entrance of a nearby center every few minutes to see if he recognized a familiar face.
A lot of rumors, exaggeration, and some outright fabrication about “looting” and “crime” became the story of the storm almost immediately—while the flooding was still going on and thousands of lives were hanging by a thread in the embattled city. One incident in which someone supposedly shot at a helicopter was followed by agonizing days in which the federal authorities refused to let people in and out of New Orleans on the pretext of concern for their own safety and well-being, while at the same time they were beginning to institute a militarized blockade and clampdown around the city and its surrounding communities.
I spoke to a young man whose home was in Treme. He had helped his family and some neighbors out as floodwaters began to surge through the streets and homes of their historic community. The biggest problem they faced was not the winds and the floodwaters, he told me. People were working with each other to try to deal with that. But as the National Guard poured into the city, they treated people like the enemy of a city they were out to occupy.
This brother said,
“Me and my friends from our block were walking around, wading around really, through all that nasty stinky water, trying to find our families, trying to find our friends, trying to find other people in our neighborhood. And we were getting food and water where we could find it. The National Guard came up to us and put guns to our heads, and told us to put our hands in the air. I told them, ’Oh man, we’re just trying to find our friends and get some food.’ They acted like we were the ones doing something wrong. You tell me how in the hell we were doing something wrong when we’re trying to find people and get something for all of us to eat? The mayor or the President or nobody else did a damn thing to save the people of New Orleans.”
A man we met from LaFayette, a musician, put in very clear terms a thought many people expressed in different ways.
“They’ve been wanting to do away with New Orleans for a long time. This flood is the perfect opportunity for genocide against the people of New Orleans. They’ve been waiting for something like this, so they could get rid of the people of New Orleans, and say they’ve ’cleaned up the city.’ I’ll say this. I was in Vietnam. And I know what troops are trained to do, and it ain’t save people. They’re trained to shoot.”
A picture has been painted by government officials and many media reports of a city and people out of control after the hurricane and flooding ripped through New Orleans. A lot of horrific crimes— almost unimaginable acts of cold-blooded criminal brutality—have occurred in New Orleans. Crimes committed by a system driven by a lust for profit and determined to preserve capitalist property relations and maintain a social control over masses of people that strengthens these relations. Crimes commited by political leaders at every level who made conscious decisions to abandon especially the poorest sections of the city and those with the highest populations of Black people, most vulnerable to the storms and flooding that have long occurred in New Orleans; to leave them utterly abandoned and sealed off from any possible aid in the moment of their most extreme and intense crisis. And now thousands of people are dead as a direct result of this system and these policies, and the causes of their deaths are being covered up while their corpses are still decomposing in the streets.
Everyone we spoke to is deeply angry at the portrayal of the city and its people that has been coming out in the newspapers and TV. They feel like they are being portrayed as criminals, as people who are somehow themselves responsible for being left devastated and homeless by the fury of this storm.
A man from Uptown New Orleans spoke with a lot of bitterness about the reports of looting and shooting that had been put out. He described how he had been on the roof of their home, with his brother, looking out for help, and witnessed some of the incidents with helicopters flying over the city. When the National Guard comes in, he said, “the first thing they want to do is shoot us down and say we’re looting.”
“They say the shooting slowed them down. They say someone was shooting at helicopters. I can’t speak for the whole city, but what I saw, that’s not true, at least not at the beginning. People were shooting in the air to try to get attention. It’s like you would shoot off a flare if you had that. We were being ignored. They’d fly right over us. People were trying to get their attention, let them know that somebody’s here who needs to get out. Then they use this to say they can’t do nothing for us. It’s the same with the fires. They say people were starting fires everywhere and trying to burn down the city. People were up on those roofs and in those buildings for days in all that heat and water, and started smoky fires to try to keep some of the mosquitos away. But they try to use anything against us. They say we’re looting and shooting and burning and then that’s their reason for not doing nothing to try to get us out of there, when all we’re doing is trying to survive. They’re not concerned about our well being down here, about our lives. They don’t give a damn, in fact, whether we live or die. And now you can see everywhere they’re sending us is down South, where they got these southern bullshit ways that people in New Orleans don’t go along with. ”
“The storm was shocking, it was the most shocking thing of my life. But how they dealt with it made it worse. Those soldiers came in, they wasn’t helping us at all, in fact they was clowning us. They was making fun of the fact that we were so desperate and so hungry. They was clowning, mocking us. I’m not going to forget that.”
Large numbers of people from New Orleans are being housed in Houston, Baton Rouge, and every city (and many small towns and rural areas) in between. Many told us that it is made to seem that they somehow did something wrong, that other ordinary people should be afraid of them. Three young people we talked to, two women and a man, were outraged that they had first been abandoned by the government, then treated like an enemy, and now looked at as if they were all somehow criminals.
One of these young women said,
“I got a strong feeling that the government did nothing because they look at the people like we’re dirt. If you’re from some of those old neighborhoods in New Orleans, they already treated us like we was dirt. The cops are the biggest looters and killers of all, everybody knows that. You look at how they can send things so fast to other countries when they want to make war, like Iraq and stuff, and then they promise to send us a big naval ship to come to New Orleans and it still ain’t there. They can do one so fast and people are still waiting for the other ship, for their ship to come in.”
One 50-year-old woman spoke with great bitterness and wanted to make clear that she was talking not just for herself but for a lot of people who were still too overwhelmed to put all their thoughts into words.
“I am so, so tired of being treated like a dog. We didn’t ask for this hurricane, it’s not our fault—and somehow we’re the ones who are being treated like we did it, like its our fault for something that went wrong, like we’re people to be afraid of. Why was it all the poor neighborhoods that got flooded the worst? You know there’s no hills in New Orleans, but somehow some places didn’t get all the high water like we got. We’re getting treated like animals. Why don’t they understand we don’t want that and won’t go with it? You have to understand some of us don’t know where our kids are, we don’t know where our families are. People have been looking for days and haven’t found anyone. We’re having such a hard time, and they’re doing us like this.”
There were countless acts of heroism and collective action among the people. A young man put 18 babies and children from apartments near his in a rowboat and rowed them to safety in the Superdome, where he continued to care for them. He wasn’t able to fit their mothers in the boat and didn’t know where they were.
We talked to a youth who had plunged into the filthy waters and swam down Canal Street to save an elderly woman who had capsized from the backyard kiddie swimming pool she was using to try to survive, and was shouting for help.
People told us of gathering food and cooking it on rooftops for people still stuck in their buildings. Several people spoke of how they and others went through apartments in the projects or houses in their neighborhoods searching for people they knew wouldn’t be able to move out on their own, and helping get them to safety.
Medical personnel did triage on the semi-submerged remains of an Interstate 10 overpass. The one nurse in the Superdome performed almost superhuman acts as she tried to somehow cope with the medical needs of the thousands of people abandoned and stranded there. At one point youths went out to get insulin from nearby drugstores so she could treat people with diabetes.
Meanwhile the government authorities were terrorizing the people directly or putting a military encirclement into place. Several people told us stories of cops— like in cities throughout the country, New Orlean cops are notorious for their brutality—who organized gangs of looting and who held people up at gunpoint. The Baton Rouge Advocate showed a picture of gun-toting cops loaded down with DVDs and CDs. A local TV news crew, out to cover flood victims surviving in New Orleans, was flagged down by people held captive in a hotel by cops who had filled several rooms on the upper floors with generators they had taken from Tulane University Hospital and expensive clothes and electronic goods they had taken from stores along Canal Street. A man with a seven-year-old daughter who hadn’t eaten in several days said the cops had hoarded all the food in the hotel and waved pistols in his face when he asked for some food for his daughter.
But people who were organizing themselves to help the people abandoned and locked in the city were actively kept out and prevented from doing so, sometimes by the armed perimeter that the government established around New Orleans, sometimes by a federal “emergency response” that acted to stifle any initiative and effort that wasn’t under its direct and immediate control. Bus drivers in Houston, Dallas, and Lafayette, Louisiana, who organized themselves to get to New Orleans to bring out as many people as possible, were prevented from doing so by FEMA, the federal agency overseeing the government’s response to Katrina. People who came with their airboats from the swamps and bayous surrounding New Orleans were prevented from taking people out or sometimes from getting in to the city. Some people took to traveling in several boats as close as they could get, and leaving some behind with the keys still in them, in the hopes that people would get to them and be able to get out.
Two men from Acadiana, one of them a former cop, told a news crew in LaFayette that they had gotten as many people as they could out of New Orleans before they were prevented from doing any more. But as one of the men said,
“We left a lot of people behind, and we could have gotten a lot more out. We were told don’t go rescue those people, and if you do and something happens to you, we don’t know you. People were dying by the hour. They were just left there. Old people were dying all around us. If it was up to us we’d still be doing this. I can’t eat or sleep thinking about those poor people still in there, and about the people who died there. Do you know what it feels like to see those people? All I can think about is those crying babies. But they took us out to the freeway and told us we’re on our own, and don’t come back.”
I spoke to a man named Shawn outside a crowded center in Baton Rouge. He said the center he was in was more like a prison than a home, and spoke bitterly and with a lot of anger to how people had been misled and mistreated since before the hurricane hit New Orleans. Shawn said,
“Bush fucked up. And he knows he fucked up, that’s why he’s coming here, to try to make us somehow forget. But he don’t care about us, the only thing he cares about is his damn self, and he’s going to keep on trying to bullshit us with whatever he can, cuz he don’t give a damn about us. They want to talk about crime, they made bigger crimes than we can even think of.”
Shawn told me that he thought that
"all the people, in Chicago and Houston and all around the world, need to get together and get his ass out of there. We need to do something, and do it now. He’s living pretty, he’s living in a damn mansion and got a war going, what the hell does he care about us? They got us locked up in here now. If he gave a damn somebody would have done something, instead of letting people die and all that. They’re dying all over the place. And I blame him. It’s his damn fault.... He wanted to start a war, and he did, he started a damn war. And now he wants to start some more wars. He could’ve left those people alone, like they’re supposed to be, and they would’ve never had no damn war.
“We need some hot food. We need hot water so we can shower, we need jobs, because all our jobs are gone. He got on TV and didn’t say a thing. Who the hell wants to hear that? He’s just making everybody angry, that’s what he’s doing. I’m tired of hearing this stuff. There’s gonna be more and more people fed up with it too. Its gonna be a long time before we can go back, maybe never. We need some money, we need some jobs, we need some houses, we’re not no children who need people looking after us, we got no need to be living like this.... They got people living like animals. And we ain’t gonna put up with it.”