Helping after Katrina

Editorial

Never before, not even in the aftermath of the 9/11 disaster, has the United States faced the grim images of bodies left unburied. The horrors facing the southern United States right now will leave impacts on the survivors that will not soon fade. That region has seen countless natural disasters, but, as this week's grave clean-up continues, we seem likely to discover that Hurricane Katrina has been the most lethal domestic disaster in American history.

Help is flowing in from all over the world. Israel, which by necessity is a global expert in mass catastrophe management, had begun to assemble a team of doctors and other medical experts to travel to the United States, but American relief organizers told them they needed only supplies, not personnel.

As a result, Israeli companies are sending tents, folding beds, bottled water, bed linen, blankets, dried food, formula, diapers and other equipment, reported the Jerusalem Post.

Magen David Adom, Israel's Red Cross affiliate, is organizing a campaign called Brit Ahim (Brotherly Covenant) for Katrina's victims.

The Americans' assertion that they have adequate personnel obviates, for the meantime, the ideological challenge presented by Fidel Castro. The Cuban dictator offered to send 1,100 doctors to the neighboring southern United States. In the past, in this space, we have criticized the refusal of some countries – most notably Iran after the catastrophic Bam earthquake – to accept Israeli assistance in times of crisis because of ideological prejudice. The prioritizing of anti-Zionist ideology over the safety of civilian citizens is an inhumane response. We trust that the United States, whatever its longstanding relations with Cuba may portend, would never endanger its citizens' lives by refusing help that is available. According to news reports, that help within the States includes only 35 per cent of the National Guard (the remainder of personnel and equipment is currently deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan).

Disasters often have unforeseen consequences – sometimes grim, sometimes redemptive. The 9/11 terror attacks ushered in a new epoch of domestic defence in North America. It also led to a reconsideration – still in progress – of that country's emergency response systems. The delay in ameliorating the Katrina disaster suggests that the emphasis on external threats may have been overestimated, while the relatively predictable annual season of tropical weather disturbances may have been sidelined.

But there are other precedents that may offer insights into Katrina's lasting impacts. One of the messages that Americans will have to face in coming days, weeks and months is the inordinate impact Katrina had on Americans living below the poverty line – many of whom who were African-American.

Natural disasters tend to impact the poor and the rich indiscriminately. In this case, the poor tended to be trapped in their homes and neighborhoods waiting out the storm, while more affluent residents had the financial resources to flee.

Two incidents that come to mind may seem only remotely related to a natural disaster of Katrina's sort, yet they may provide lessons.

In March 1911, a fire broke out in a clothing factory in New York City. The workers, mostly women, mostly immigrants, a large proportion of them Jewish, were trapped in the inferno because employers made a habit of locking the workers in the factory. On this day, 146 perished, some jumping from upper floors of the early high-rise to their deaths in grisly images that still haunt Americans today.

The redemptive lesson Americans took from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire was that immigrant labor, women and the poor deserved treatment that not only respected their humanity, but which, in this case, could have saved their lives.

More recently, though it may seem a civilization away, was the case of Emmet Till. In 1955, the 14-year-old African-American boy, visiting Mississippi from his Chicago home, did not understand the unwritten rules of segregation and the racism of America's South. He was beaten to death in one of that era's most grotesque acts of racist violence.

Till's murder, aided by the powerful testament of his grieving mother, helped spark the civil rights movement by illustrating for the mass of Americans the ugliness and cruelty of institutionalized racism.

The Katrina disaster will have lasting impacts on American society. Most obviously, it has led to what will probably be the largest internal migration of Americans in history. But it may also lead to deep soul-searching about racial and economic divisions in the world's richest society.

When we consider tikkun olam (repair of the world) in the context of Hurricane Katrina, it may be more than repairing homes and shattered lives. Tikkun olam, in this case, may mean an overdue consideration of the inequalities that allowed wealth and skin color to inordinately determine the likelihood of survival.

^TOP