Taking Natural Disasters Personally

Disasters – natural and man-made – have a habit of bringing out the best and worst of everyone. Most of the time, it tends to be the former. Donations and condolences are pouring into the Gulf Coast, and I have complete confidence that the cities of New Orleans and Biloxi will be rebuilt. New Orleans is one of my favorite cities. My wife and I traveled there about five years ago and fell in love with the cuisine, the music and some of the friendliest Americans we’ve ever encountered. Everyone called us “honey,” the drinks were great and we still plan on returning some day.

And for bringing out the worst in people? Looters, gas price gougers and insurance scam artists are well known and have earned their special place in jail, if not hell itself. But while most of the world is looking to help and heal, political partisans seize the opportunity to promote and exploit their own interests by demonizing anyone who disagrees with them and absurdly linking their opponents to disasters. The attacks are so loopy and illogical they should be hilarious, but the virulence of the accusers wipes the smiles from our faces. Sadly, these attacks happen all too often and help destroy any bipartisan efforts. It’s also disconcerting and a huge turn-off to independents like myself.

Newt Gingrich ended his political career by blaming a hideous murder of a pregnant mother and the kidnapping of her unborn child on the welfare state, and then ended his hari-kari by urging everyone “to vote Republican.” Long before he helped re-elect the president, Michael Moore said the 9/11 terrorists erred by killing people who didn’t vote for George W. Bush. And today, with entire Louisiana and Mississippi towns and cities washed away, we have another hateful group of partisans rising from sewers and mudholes to advance their causes at the expense of victims, and trying to plant a political reason upon a natural disaster. Here’s the worst I’ve seen so far, but don’t worry – there will be more:

· Huffington Post: Nobody outside of California had even heard of Ariana Huffington before she ran for governor of California two years ago (and dropped out of the race after mustering a whopping 2% support). But her web site is well-known and somewhere to the left of Cuba. One of her bloggers says the Republicans have left all of us “raped, pillaged and terrorized” and says the president scares her more than terrorists. Another blogger claims that the hurricane would not have been so devastating if Carter had beat Reagan in 1980. And Ms. Huffington herself excoriates the president for not being in New Orleans already, somehow overlooking that the N.O.P.D. may be busy with things like saving lives and stopping looters to stop what they’re doing and provide a security detail for the president. Keep in mind that unlike me, many of the bloggers here consider themselves professional writers.

· Religious Right: When evangelicals and some so-called people of God aren’t hating homosexuals, advocating assassinations and claiming that life on earth began 6,000 years ago, they’re telling the rest of us how to live our lives. They’re also claiming New Orleans deserves what it got because of the city’s penchant for decadence. RepentAmerica.com says “This act of God destroyed a wicked city. From 'Girls Gone Wild' to 'Southern Decadence', New Orleans was a city that had its doors wide open to the public celebration of sin.” Another web site called Abominations (I can’t tell whether this one is a joke or not) says “Due to the hand of God the (Labor Day Weekend Gay Parade) in New Orleans and "May this act of God cause us all to think about what we tolerate in our city limits, and bring us trembling before the throne of Almighty God."

Nice, huh? There are also a bunch of people blaming the president and his environmental policies for the hurricane, just like they did for the tsunami last year. These are undoubtedly the same people who blamed Theodore Roosevelt for the San Francisco earthquake and President Chester Alan Arthur for the 1883 Krakatoa eruption. Most of these people are so partisan they can’t think straight and believe Republicans are the source of natural disasters, the boogeyman in the closet and the common cold.

Global warming is also being tossed around a bit. The jury’s obviously still out on global warming (I invite anyone who thinks the planet is getting warmer to spend the winter in Boston, where we had over 100 inches of snow last year and had to keep our heat on until Memorial Day). I’ve met a few meteorologists and climatologists who said it is absolutely natural for weather to be cyclical, even in 20- and 50-year cycles, but I don’t even pretend to be well-informed on this subject. Nobody can definitively say whether global warming exists or, if it does, whether it exacerbated the situation.

While sane people focus on how to help the victims of this tragedy, there are three items that I may revisit in this space, because each brings up important non-partisan issues.

1) Did federal budget cuts curtail improvement on New Orleans levee protection and improvement? Yes, you can read it here. Would this have stopped or cut down on the flooding? That’s another definite maybe, but whoever ordered those budget cuts has something to answer for.

2) New Orleans is a largely African-American city. In a cruel twist of fate, the upper class (and mostly white) French Quarter and Garden District have been spared the worst of the damage, while poorer, minority neighborhoods have been obliterated. It will be very interesting to see which neighborhoods are rebuilt first and where FEMA, relief and cleanup dollars go. How quickly, efficiently and fairly New Orleans is remade and how displaced refugees are compensated for their losses will speak volumes about how far this Southern city has come in race relations, political cronyism and civics.

3) Despite being the most generous nation on earth, the U.S. has been called “stingy” in its foreign and disaster relief efforts. This is nonsense. Last year, the U.S. gave over $1 billion to tsunami relief (and billions more in private donations) and spent an additional $19 billion in foreign aid, which included over $1 billion in loan write-offs to corrupt countries like the Democratic Republic for the Congo that squander the money. While the U.S. may not require foreign and disaster aid from abroad the way the Asian countries did, it will be very interesting to see how much foreign aid helps the poor people of New Orleans from foreign countries and individuals who said we do not enough for the world.

More info:

American Red Cross Hurricane Relief Donations

Salvation Army Hurrican Relief Donations