Refugees. Wrap your mind around that word.
In America.
Some wanted to call the Americans fleeing the ravages of Hurricane Katrina “displaced persons.”
We didn’t call them that in Bosnia, Somalia or Bhopal. Sugarcoating words doesn’t give these tens of thousands from Louisiana and Mississippi fresh clothes, water or shelter. It doesn’t make this tragedy any less awful.
Unfortunately, we try to make events and situations palatable by massaging phrases. Accidental civilian deaths become “collateral damage.” Rape becomes “sexual assault.” People who have nothing and nowhere to go become “displaced.”
They are refugees. Ask anyone at the United Nations, where members have way too much experience in this area.
Louisiana, roughly the size of England, might as well be the port city of history-rich Izmit, Turkey, where a devastating earthquake killed more than 2,000 people in August 1999. How visceral it becomes when what happens elsewhere happens here.
Painfully, we now see what we have heretofore ignored: substantial poverty tucked deep inside the wealth, privilege and creature comforts of the so-called good life.
For all of their rich history, antebellum housing, carriage tours, fine dining and garish casinos, Louisiana and Mississippi remain two of our poorest states – and it took a deadly hurricane to starkly bring that fact into public view. As novelist Ralph Ellison might have said, we have been forced to see the invisible people.
The Third World, American style.
Not enough of us thought about that poverty until a few days ago. An unprecedented natural disaster exposed how we have more in common with the people of Indonesia, the Seychelles and Somalia than we realized.
And now overseas countries are sending out offers to help refugees from the Big Easy.
Heartwarming reminiscences have ushered forth from those who remember the New Orleans tourists and visitors know.
I, too, can remember a delicious afternoon at Galatoire’s with my father – seafood remoulade, gumbo, chilled beer and live theater with diners and tuxedo-clad waiters as the cast. New Orleans was where we heard the Cannonball Adderly Quintet jam until sunrise, followed by coffee and beignets at Cafe du Monde.
Oh, New Orleans.
I will always remember Nawlins as a city whose population is a patchwork quilt of ethnicities. But I also remember the day after Christmas 2004, when holiday reveries were shattered by the horror of Southeast Asians struggling in the wake of a tsunami.
Fast-forward to endless scenes in New Orleans of people pleading for help from rooftops. Heartbreaking pleas from physicians and nurses to send boats for the most critically ill. Inundated hospitals. Food in distressingly short supply.
Military convoys four days after the fact.
Presumably, the more well-to-do left for second homes or dear friends on higher ground. With stocked pantries. People with no cars had no such options. No need for the well-heeled to loot stores for diapers, salami, water and crackers.
And let’s not forget the other looting: Gas prices escalating overnight to $5 a gallon.
While measuring devices in the South Pacific weren’t positioned near the massive tectonic shift that birthed a vicious tsunami, and there was no way to warn the thousands who died, scientists on this side of the globe warned repeatedly of a hurricane with the potential to devastate low-lying cities, particularly New Orleans.
Who knows why municipal, state or federal authorities failed to act on that information over the years?
Since emergency response isn’t retroactive, the people of coastal Louisiana and Mississippi – the refugees – are paying a terrible price for living below sea level.
So it looks like old memories and the music of Mahalia Jackson, Louis Armstrong, Michael Doucet and Buckwheat Zydeco will have to sustain us until the good times roll again.
