Not Just the Levees Broke

The internet at work has been maddeningly slow the past couple of days...so slow that it is pretty much useless to try to even use it. (So much for integration of technology...we can't even get on the web). Since I couldn't use the circulation system, run reports, work on book lists, work on my book trailers, etc. I started reading a book yesterday afternoon about 30 minutes before I went home....and couldn't put it down. It is entitled "Not Just the Levees Broke" and is one woman's account of her experience in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.

The author of this book is an ordinary woman and her words are plain, but honest and horrifying. There is so much that the news didn't show us during that time and so many stories that have never been heard. I still remember watching the reports during that time and being shocked and helpless at the tragedy unfolding in our own country...I remember going down to Reunion Arena where residents and survivors were being bussed in and talking to these people who had just been through an experience I couldn't even imagine then with my limited knowledge of what had occurred. Now after reading this book, I wish I had been seeing with different eyes then....I wish it hadn't taken years for these people's stories to be heard. I really wish they didn't even have these stories to tell in the first place...but they did...they do...and yet we have moved on without ever really listening.

As in so many situations in our country and our world, New Orleans resembles an onion...so many layers to what occurred. So much complexity, so many interpretations, so many fingers pointed, so many causes, and so many proposed solutions. Blame has been placed in so many different places...from Bush, to FEMA, to the Corps of Engineers, to the residents themselves. In reading this book and thinking about this event, I have looked in from so many angles, and it only grows more complex in nature. But I guess the thing that stayed the same no matter what angle I tried to observe from and the thing that really disturbed me most was the indignities that these people suffered. I remember my conversations here in Dallas with weary displaced residents. I see in my students' writing stories of shame (students transferred here after Katrina). And now through this book, I am being reminded again of how these residents were made to feel during this horrible time. I know it was an unexpected, catastrophic, and chaotic time...but is there ever a time or a reason to make people feel less than human? It's so hard to swallow that our fellow Americans were treated like cattle, not 200 hundred years ago at a slave auction, but 5 years ago in New Orleans.

I don't think any of us that weren't there will ever really understand what happened and what was endured. Perhaps it has been melodramatized and glamorized like so many other things by our media....but I can't help but hear the honesty and the pain in this woman's voice and others voices I have met...can't help but believe that their stories are true and that their stories demand answers that too many in America aren't ready to give. Like I said, I know there are many layers to this onion, but I also know that at the end of the day, we all deserve some level of dignity no matter the circumstances...and maybe that's what justice is really all about after all.