The Big Boot, The Wall and The Mirror

This is an essay from Elisabeth Gleckler, Assistant Professor, University of New Orleans, Health Promotion Program. She evacuated to Baton Rouge before Katrina hit.

The Big Boot, The Wall and The Mirror
It is early in the school year and I should be setting up my students with internships and arranging for my students in health classes for their field experiences in one of the New Orleans public schools. On Saturday afternoon, I was supposed to attend the wedding of one of my favorite undergraduate students. Instead I am writing from a coffee shop somewhere in Baton Rouge with everything I own in my car and homeless. How I ended up here in dirty clothes and needing a shower instead of grading class assignments is story worth telling. This essay, my first reaction to Katrina, takes the form of a warning to the rest of the nation. As an educator I have a tendency to use mnemonics to help people retain lessons. So, here is my Katrina mnemonic: the big boot, the wall and the mirror.

First, the Big Boot
I take this lesson directly from anti-racism training by The People’s Institute in New Orleans. We live in a worldwide economic system of oppression. Deliberately, I do not use “United States” because with the way that modern economies and governments are constructed; this goes beyond national geographic borders. There is enormous wealth and power concentrated in the hands of few. The way to gain more money and power is by exploiting the powerlessness and poverty of the many. It used to be that we believed the American dream that anyone could succeed and, occasionally there is a freak of nature and a few people do rise to a level of control. By in large, if you are born in poverty you will stay there.

Even beyond the lack of access to opportunity, people are robbed of their vision of personal agency because of the predominate belief that the poor are in that state because they did something to deserve it; circumstances of the destitution be damned. I do believe in personal responsibility, but I also believe in the power of the environment and context. In a twisted way, a certain amount of poverty is good for business. Poor people means there is cheap labor. It has become irrelevant if those cheap workers are in the US or in Indonesia. Exploiting their destitution offers profound economic benefits to the powerful. The Big Boot is the economic structure hovering over the masses of us who do not have power – which is most of us, whether we recognize it or not.

In a disaster there is an additional boot - charity. How dare the people who are taking our charity ever have their own perception of our magnanimity! There are very clear behaviors that need to be acted out when charity is handed out and if you are receiving charity, those relationships had better not be violated. Never mind that the role of a civilized government is to step in to protect the individual when they are powerless. Ideally, people should expect that without having to beg or grovel.

New Orleans’ particular piece of the boot is an abandoned population who at minimum wage, truly and metaphorically, changed the linens of the people who came to New Orleans to gorge on food and drink until they threw up on Bourbon Street and made it to a street where residents didn’t even visit. There is a pattern of exploitation and the people left behind in Katrina had plenty of reason to act out, not that I approve of shooting or attacking anyone. The destruction of New Orleans is based on a long, complex and profound history of betrayal of public trust.

The lesson we need to learn from watching Katrina is that we need to wake up to the system and deliberately examine it without the fantasy of the American Dream or without thinking that this country is a functioning democracy that can operate without active oversight by the public. Labor unions are a good thing. Local politics closely observed by citizens is a good thing. Investigations into the motivations of public officials are good things. Investigations into the financial dealings of corporations are a very good thing. Not buying from corporations that take advantage of people is a good thing. Demanding a piece of the profits of industry to be returned to support the community in which they operate is more than a good thing. It is necessary.

The second point is our distance from the wall
Once, my brother tried to explain advance mathematics and chaos theory to me. Always the patient educator, he said it was like standing next to a wall. When you look at the view in front of it, all you see is disordered marks. When you step back a little you see that what is in your view is actually lines of something bigger. A little further back finds that it is not disordered scratches on the wall but a picture. With enough distance, what is rendered on the wall becomes a picture. In the case of Katrina, please step far to the rear to see that the picture is a repeating pattern at the global level.

New Orleans and the gulf coast have been your canary in the coal mine. It is us in New Orleans now; it will be you a little later. The water off the coast was 91 degrees as Katrina passed over it. Put a storm system over that heat and you are just pouring fuel into the tank of the hurricane. The wetlands that could have helped protect from storm surge are decimated because no one wanted to flood the wetlands with silt-rich water from the Mississippi River to keep the ratio of nutrients and water supporting wetlands vegetation. Real estate developers had laid down miles of housing tracts in the land that needed to be periodically flooded. Canals and pipelines had been dug, for oil and chemical companies, into the marshes which changed the flow of water and brought new salinity into tracts of marsh. Chemical companies released effluents and warm water. They cooled their plants with water from the aquifer and dumped it back out. For decades oil companies have reaped enormous profits from sucking oil from below the earthen plate that is the Mississippi delta as the land began to sink and the coast line receded. The present White House is lead by two ex-oil industry executives who have turned over consumer and environmental protections to the control of industry influenced policy wonks. This is about looting citizen control of government and letting business interests dominate over health and welfare of the public. And where is the leadership for the common man that we say is part of the American system of government? It is in the hallways of Halliburton.

And finally, they way we see ourselves, The Mirror
I watched the media coverage of Katrina in the houses of my friends. Until September 1, several days into the disaster, the only talking head who put a moment of deep reality into their commentary was Winton Marsalis, a man who is always astute about race and poverty. He talked about the desperation of people in New Orleans, indirectly saying, “What do you expect?” when the TV interviewer asked him about the rioting in the streets when social control collapsed. It took several more days for people to begin to think past the inflammatory images, to reflect upon the status of people left behind – figuratively and literally. Of course a rapper had to yell at the president on a telethon and a congresswoman had to threaten him with bodily harm before a little better analysis began.

The opposite of the stepping back from the wall is modern commercial television reporting. By dint of the technology, cameras only catch a tiny picture of the horizon and not smell, feeling, and only some filtered sound. The view is interpreted by talking heads who gain a direct benefit of inflating frightening and shocking images and stories. Add to this a cadre of people who earn their money and power by being seen in front of a TV camera talking about New Orleans without knowing the city or commenting about the situation without being there; having no training in disasters or in interpreting human behavior. It becomes a nasty gumbo of near-reality and manipulation.

TV makes people think they are really there, experiencing the event. One sees the image and it triggers a belief that they have an understanding of the issue. It is a dangerous mix of confidence builder and a profoundly small frame that is made smaller because of the interpreters who stand between viewer and the images. The stories come at us so fast that they can’t be processed and only some stories make the screen. It is clearly not reality yet it provokes strong emotions as if it were.

Many people have commented about the racism of the images and the media coverage. Sure there is institutional racism and clear cases of overt racism in the coverage. The color of the skin is a proxy identifier for oppression, poverty, and powerlessness. There is nothing inherent about the nature of skin color except that it has been western civilization’s visual cue to dehumanize the person in that skin for some form of economic profit. So, what TV producers have done in capturing images based on deeply imbedded racism is a reflection of our civilization’s overall pattern of brutalization. That’s not to make an apology for the disgusting coverage. One would think if they get paid the big salaries to be commentators and reporters they should have enough wits to see this clearly and earn their keep by actually offering some meaningful text.

But, the people who are in the frame need to keep many people watching so that advertising time is sold. The whole system exists to increase consumption of a lot of stuff that none of us need. One example was that in the midst of the first days of the Katrina TV coverage, there was an ad for an SUV. How close to the wall are we standing for that not to provoke outrage?

TV does not encourage us to step back and process the sad irony of global warming and big, fat cars that waste precious oil and a city inundated with water in the midst of a weakened wetland. I see lots of SUVs proudly displaying George Bush bumper stickers. The reflective moment does not make good TV, so we get “fair and balanced” “headline” news on tickertapes across the screen masquerading as useful information.

So, the wall holds the mirror and we hope, as in other times in history that the boot is ready to kick it.
When we bring these little lessons behind the mnemonics together, there is a profound warning. The Mayans in Central America had a great civilization. They suddenly imploded and disappeared as a dominant social force before the Spanish came to the “New World.” Recent theories point to an ecological disaster that finished their cities and political systems. We are no better than the Mayans and their fate will be our fate.

We can’t wait for the President of the United States to decide to accept a theory of global warming until it becomes economically convenient for himself and his friends. If he is blinded, then we need to take off his blindfold. We should be demanding stronger federal tax breaks and outright funding for non-oil technologies. We need to invest in public transportation and quit dicking around and use it. Forget the “death tax.” Tax the rich, they are good at making money and they owe it to the system where they made it. All that garbage you see on TV, turn off the tube and don’t buy it. You don’t need the newest junk to be a well-rounded and personally rich human being. Buying packaged goods from China? Well, don’t be surprised if you end up getting laid off from your job. Are you buying from a mega-plex shopping box store? If you end up having no viable local businesses, then you only have yourself to blame. Ever wonder what happened to local farms? Then purchase your food from people closer to the producer instead of massive markets. Hate the corruption in government? Then oversee it and get involved. Run for office, get on a committee. You should have more time to assure that it protects the interests of you and your children if you stop watching re-runs on TV. We have to turn the American capitalism around to operate farther from the wall, put the boot down and look in the mirror.

I really loved and hated New Orleans. People are lying or they are tourists if they say that they loved it without hesitation. Great art and music came from the depths of its poverty. The corruption was colossal and evil. When you worked there you have to have a special touch to get things done because people thought about things differently than in other parts of the country. You had to stop, watch and suspend judgment to learn the lessons that the city had to offer. As a professor in a state university located in the city, I had a lot of respect for my college students. Many were the first one in their family to go to college, most worked low paying jobs and had spouses and children on top of class and assignments. My heart aches for New Orleans. I already miss people and relationships and it has only been a week since Katrina hit as I write this. The thing that New Orleans had that I have never found anywhere else was a kind of “old school” combination of strong community, wry insight into humanity, awareness of oppression and racism, mixed with social irreverence and understanding of what is truly valuable in life. The streets stank because life sticks but it did not stop people from their lives and loves. There was really was no other place like this city and the people living there. The rest of the country may not yet understand the loss, but this city provided something irreplaceable. I hope you all take the warning.