Levees of Isolation

Post-Katrina, all America is wallowing in a septic overflow of guilt, a toxic effluvium of recrimination for how we could have let a mere storm — a bad one, to be sure — expose in this land an entrenched poverty whose face, in the case of the City of New Orleans, is over two-thirds black.

David Remnick's New Yorker article "High Water: How Presidents and citizens react to disaster" (Oct. 3, 2005) puts an exclamation point on the hand-wringing and teeth-gnashing. In 1965, Remnick reminds us, Hurricane Betsy breached New Orleans' levees, "causing much of the city to flood overnight, especially the neighborhoods of Bywater, Pontchartrain Park, and the largely black and impoverished Ninth Ward." President Lyndon B. Johnson, with just a little prodding by Lousiana Senator Russell Long, took the bull by the horns right away. The day after the hurricane struck, LBJ was on the ground in the Ninth Ward, yelling to frightened victims, "This is your President! I'm here to help you!" And the following day, back in the White House, Johnson sent New Orleans Mayor Victor Hugo Schiro "a sixteen-page telegram outlining plans for aid and the revival of New Orleans."

Would that our current President had been so prompt, so emphatic ... and so compassionate.


"Compassion is the basis of truth," Albert Nolan writes in Jesus before Christianity (p. 152). "The experience of compassion is the experience of suffering or feeling with someone. To suffer or feel with humanity, nature and God is to be in tune with the rhythms and impluses of life. This is also the experience of solidarity, solidarity with humanity, nature and God. It excludes every form of alienation and falsehood. It makes a person at one with reality and therefore true and authentic in himself."

Jesus derived his "authority" — his power over evil spirits, etc. — from his compassion, says Nolan. To be more accurate, Jesus spurned any and every external source of "authority." He derived his unerring convictions about the truth of faith in a compassionate God directly from his own compassion for and with those who suffer. "He did not make authority his truth, he made truth his authority" (p. 151). "The secret of Jesus' infallible insight and unshakable convictions was his unfailing experience of solidarity with God, which revealed itself as an experience of solidarity with humanity and nature. This made of him a uniquely liberated man, uniquely courageous, fearless, independent, hopeful and truthful" (p. 152).

Can we say the same for George W. Bush, post-Katrina?


For President Bush has not spoken promptly, emphatically, authoritatively, and compassionately about the invisible levees of isolation which cut off New Orleans' Ninth Ward and other poor, black areas from the better-to-do, not-so-black parts of the city.

As Remnick relates in his article, a disproportionate number of evacuees who are black believe they have nothing to go home to. A lot of them believe they will never go home. Many of these displaced folks are "not only furious—furious at the President and local officials, furious at being ignored for days—but inclined to believe, as many did after Betsy, that the flooding of the city was, or could have been, a deliberate act."

This sort of alienation has roots in history. After Betsy, in 1965, "in shelters in Louisiana and Texas you heard the suspicion that the 'higher powers' of New Orleans wanted to employ a policy of citywide gentrification through natural disaster, that a mass exile of poor African-Americans was 'the silver-lining scenario'.”

It didn't help that "Betsy was followed within days by widespread rumors that Mayor Schiro had ordered floodwater pumped out of his own well-to-do subdivision, Lake Vista, and into the Ninth Ward. ... There were also stories that he had ordered the levees breached."

In those days, we had quite a race problem, quite a poverty problem, quite a trust problem.


We have a race problem still. We have a poverty problem still. But most of all, we have an alienation problem still. Huge numbers of New Orleans evacuees don't believe the rest of us want them in our world.

We have spiritual egg all over our supposedly Christian faces because Katrina revealed in us a lack of compassionate solidarity with all our neighbors. True, we scrambled to make it all better, giving a billion dollars and counting in private donations for hurricane relief, and promising untiold billions in federal aid. We deserve credit for that.

But tell the truth, child. Do we really expect our experience of solidarity with God, Jesus, and the disenfranchised and alienated sufferers in Katrina's wake to last through the next mid-term elections in 2006? Through the next Presidential election in 2008? Or will the invisible levees of isolation be rebuilt along with the physical levees that wall in the below-sea-level island of New Orleans?