A Certain Hell

I remember it well. Because I'm a news junkie, I watched every minute on every channel of the coverage. I was aghast. Things were going from bad to worse, and it was all captured on video and broadcast to every home in the nation. But who was really paying attention?

Katrina hit five years ago. NBC and Brian Williams is doing a kind of retrospect. It brought back a particular memory of something that was disturbing to me. But it didn't just happen to me; it was happening all over the place.

I was sitting at a lunch table in September of 2005, four days after the levees broke. I had been watching the horrors and, as the self-appointed "current event conversationalist," I said to my companions, "have you seen what's happening in New Orleans?"

They both looked at me quizzically. "Well, yeah, we know there was a hurricane..."

"No, I mean the levees," I explained. "They broke, and large parts of the city are under 10 feet of water or more, and people are stranded all over the place, and they don't have food, or water..."

And one of them interrupted, "But FEMA is taking care of them, right?" Because we were used to seeing these big storms and watching FEMA run right in and hand out the food and water and medical supplies and then everything was 'back to normal' within what seemed like minutes.

"No! FEMA is not there, no one is getting supplies to them, and there's looting and people firing at rescuers and half the police force seems to have disappeared and people are dying in the streets and it's horrible! And the government isn't doing anything!"

They both still looked at me, like they were waiting for the punch line. I must be kidding, nothing like that happens here. "It looks like a third world country," I said. Clearly, they couldn't believe me. I understood; I didn't have any video to show them.

And the rest of the country was probably feeling the same thing: confusion. The president was seen slapping ole what's his name on the back and saying, "And Brownie, you're doin' a heck of a job..." Brown was the FEMA director. He lasted about another week or so, then checked out. This whole rescuing thing is a lot harder in person than it is on tv! So he left. He never did do a "heck of a " anything. He's now a radio talk show host in Denver. A job in communication. Sweet.

And Bush, it turned out, was being shown what was happening, but he didn't move his butt, either. No one had a handle on things, as it turned out. But at the time, the government was saying everything was fine and was proceeding as planned and the news was reporting the exact opposite. A cognitive dissonance: something we learned in the Vietnam war. You can be told one thing, and be shown something completely different. Are you going to believe your eyes, or the lie I'm going to tell you?

The news from every major channel was broadcasting the video. The camera found people stranded on rooftops, holding signs with desperate words "help us!" The camera witnessed dead bodies floating in the horrible, oil-stained, sewer-filled wretched water. The camera spotted scared-out-of-their-mind pets, the family member you can't ever seem to take with you. The camera watched rescues of old people, of sick people, of babies, of pets; it captured the thousands of people crying in pain and anguish, some sitting with relatives right where they had dropped dead with no help and no place to move them; it recorded babies crying, wearily, wearing days old, used diapers, or not wearing any diapers at all, with mothers who could barely deal with their baby's misery much less their own and the heartache of fathers unable to do anything to help their family; it saw the huge piles of garbage everywhere as people were forced to live in their own filth and excrement, the facilities, worn out and used up so quickly in this emergency as to be completely useless; it witnessed the death: people who hadn't had the medical attention (or maybe just some water!) to survive what became days and days and days of pure torture. Temperatures reaching 100 degrees, with the typical Gulf Coast humidity, made trying to exist without water literally killer. It was awful to watch. It must have been a certain hell to survive.

And where was the "government"? Stumbling over themselves, accusing each other, delivering mixed messages and receiving bad information, trying to create a soothing aura of calm and control. It seemed that, if you didn't have access to the pictures and the on-the-street reporting, you might be lulled into thinking, as my friends evidently were, that everything was going as planned. But that was a lie. Over and over, the people in charge lied, misled, misdirected, or framed their actions in the context of "we are doing" rather than "we can not or have not." And even the people in the midst of the horror believed them, to their detriment. The victims believed that "help was on the way." The government was a lie.

So five years later, we look at what's been done and what's not been done and we remember what's been forgotten, who's survived and who hasn't, what was said and what wasn't, what the truth really was, and what the truth wasn't. It was terrible to watch all that pain and anguish then. It was terrible to watch it again.

Next time? Will there be a next time? Of course there will be, to someone, somewhere. And the government will have some "truth" to sell to us. And hopefully we'll also have the video. We'll see if they match.

And maybe next time I'll have instant access to the video so I can offer the proof.