Image after image of unrelenting sorrow, layered one atop the other like
a deck of haunting cards. A baby held aloft, inches above a sea of
desperate faces, gasping for air. The dead left where they've fallen, in
plain view, robbed of even the simple dignity of a shroud. Survivors
waiting, then begging, then fighting, finally, over food and water.
Here.
ERIC GAY/AP
Terri Jones, right, and others try to cool down fellow flood
victim Dorthy Divic, 89, center, who was over heated and exhausted
at the New Orleans Convention Center on Thursday.
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While the images of natural disasters and man-made ones alike, from Sri
Lanka or Baghdad, cause despair, the pictures from New Orleans inspire
not just helplessness, but disbelief. The richest, most powerful nation
in the world can build schools, hospitals and shelters halfway around
the globe, but it can't provide the basic necessities for its own days
after a disaster that everybody saw coming?
Here?
Usually, we shudder, change the channel or turn the page, awaiting
better news. But there is something too compelling about these pictures.
The distance between us and the people in them has been narrowed,
rendered uncomfortably close, and not just for those who are family,
friends or neighbors. We recognize them. We all see people like them.
Here.
Authorities can't make the waters that did that retreat. They can't
begin to rebuild the levee or the homes and businesses made
uninhabitable, at least not now. They will never be able to restore much
of what was washed away in the flood.
But if a reporter can interview a man standing outside a looted
drugstore, and record his reluctance at having to go inside and steal
pads for incontinence, why couldn't someone get medical supplies to the
people huddled at the Superdome or the convention center in time, or the
buses promised to evacuate them?
There are more questions than answers, and will be for years to come.
That's the nature of disaster, and its aftermath. They expose our
fragility, overwhelm our best intentions, mock our attempts to impose
the sense of calm and order that prevails when life proceeds according
to some rough plan.
Yet, ultimately, that's what is most unsettling about the constant
stream of images: The suffering goes on not just for hours, but for days
after we should have and could have ended it. And for all the
commissions, reports and bravado that passes for preparedness, we
didn't. It was a hand we never expected to be dealt.
Here.
There will be time enough, too, to assess blame, for politicians to
point fingers, find and fire those deemed accountable. And maybe even to
figure out how a handful of Southeast Asian governments, whose
economies, armies and emergency resources could all be folded
comfortably several times inside those of the United States, responded
to a tsunami much larger and fiercer than Hurricane Katrina with
swiftness and efficiency, and we could not. And so the frustration
builds, not so much over what happened, but what did not.
Here.
In the meantime, the disturbing images keep rolling in, interrupted now
and then by more hopeful ones. The trucks, jeeps, buses and helicopters
so scarce the past few days are out moving in force. Police and National
Guardsmen are on the streets, rescue workers are getting in place. The
babies in the latest pictures are contentedly emptying bottles, pallets
filled with water and food are being unloaded by human chains. One
administration official after another turns up on the screen to offer
reassurances and soothing words.
But the damage has been done, and it's no longer limited to the lives
lost and ruined, or the property destroyed. Those are things, sadly
enough, that can be totaled up over time.
Much harder to measure is the cost of all those searing images burned
into the national conscience, and what they've done to the sense of
security that was our last refuge when disasters wreaked havoc, and
then, unnecessary suffering, in distant lands - the certainty that it
couldn't happen here.
Now we know better.
