The Third World in America

An immense portrait of catastrophic suffering has emerged from New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in the past couple of days, even as well-suited politicians in DC continue giving jarringly out-of-touch press conferences and interviews congratulating one another for their own courageous leadership in these trying times. It has been an awful spectacle.

Many Americans are shocked to see images of Third World squalor right here in a great American city: streams of exhausted refugees; unattended corpses amid rubble and human waste; infants and the elderly unprotected from heat, hunger, and dehydration; a complete breakdown of social infrastructure.

And yet, the reality is that the United States, despite being the wealthiest and most militarily powerful nation in the world, isn't nearly as exceptional as people like to think. The reality is that poverty, deprivation, and deep-seated official neglect have resulted in pockets of Third World despair in urban ghettos and rural slums across the land. Hurricane Katrina has simply torn the lid off this dirty secret, putting America's deep divisions of race and class on full display.

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Randall Robinson writes on The Huffington Post:

It is reported that black hurricane victims in New Orleans have begun eating corpses to survive. Four days after the storm, thousands of blacks in New Orleans are dying like dogs. No-one has come to help them.

I am a sixty-four year old African-American. New Orleans marks the end of the America I strove for. [...]

My hand shakes with anger as I write. I, the formerly un-jaundiced human rights advocate, have finally come to see my country for what it really is. A monstrous fraud.

As a benchmark for comparison, check out Linda Cronin-Gross's description of how Cuba handles hurricane evacuations.

Now in stark contrast: In an interview on NPR this morning, the secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff was actually unaware that there were thousands of desperate refugees in the New Orleans Convention Center, even after horrific footage from within the center was splashed all over cable news all day yesterday. And in an interview on NBC Nightline, FEMA director Michael Brown also reveals how clueless and ineffectual federal relief agencies are about the situation on the ground, speaking in future tense about what should already have happened.

Meanwhile, in an interview on WWL-AM, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin justifiably loses his temper as he rails against the inadequate federal response to the disaster. The interview ends with both the mayor and the interviewer breaking down in tears.

Finally, Deepak Chopra writes on The Huffington Post that the New Orleans disaster is symptomatic of humanity's "war against Nature", which includes "abolishing native plant species in favor of over planting the same few crops", "exploiting fossil fuels without regard for their environmental effects", "polluting the ocean to the extent that half the world's coral reefs are immediately in danger", "diverting and damming rivers without regard to the ecology or human needs downstream", and "eliminating wild lands and forests by stripping them of all vegetation":

When Thoreau made his famous comment, "In wildness is the preservation of the world," he had no idea of the alarming rate at which human beings would mistake short-term gratification for successful living. The environmental argument has been well addressed in hundreds of places, and perhaps the stridency of ecological alarmists has numbed the public to what's going on, leaving an opening for President Bush and other anti-environmentalists to deliver the reassuring message, "Nothing's wrong. Go back to whatever you were doing."

I think New Orleans will stick indelibly in our national consciousness as stark evidence that the war against Nature has to be ended. The choice is more clear cut than ever, and one only hopes that international cooperation is in the offing, since we are no longer apart from the so-called Third World in enduring intolerable calamity.