The Mourning After: Katrina and 11 September

It is natural, healthy and customary for a family or community to endure a period of mourning after the loss of loved ones. The greater the tragedy, the more incomprehensible the cause, the deeper and longer the period of mourning will be.

It is as essential to the healing process for a family, a community or an individual to mourn as it is to recover and move on. The process of healthy mourning involves burying the dead, paying tribute to those lost, arriving at a satisfactory understanding of why the tragedy happened and receiving reasonable assurances that it will not happen again.

Five years after the 9-11 terrorist attack and one year after Katrina, in more ways than we care to acknowledge, America remains a nation in mourning.

We walk through our daily lives because we must survive yet our grief resides just below the surface. We remain hypersensitive to any hint of terrorist plots or storms rising in the Caribbean. We see danger where there is none and panic when there is. We hold our neighbors under a cloud of suspicion. We are prone to tears or irrational outbursts. We hide our fear and insecurity beneath facades of patriotism, pride or stoic indifference.

When a family endures a tragedy, the elders must guide its surviving members through the mourning process. When the tragedy engulfs the psyche of an entire nation, our national leaders must rise to the occasion.

If America is arrested in perpetual mourning, it is because our leaders have failed us.

How have they failed?

In the days after 9-11, at a time when we were more united than at any time since World War II, we were given mixed messages. We were told that the world had irrevocably changed and that we were entering an era of perpetual warfare against an invisible enemy. We were told that the next attack was inevitable. We were also told that, while we should remain vigilant (i.e., spy on our neighbors), the best thing we could do was to carry on as if nothing had changed. We were told to go shopping.

When the time came to understand the tragedy that had befallen us, we were delivered a flawed, politically correct report centered on intelligence failures, patently ignoring White House culpability, root causes, and all evidence that ran contrary to the government story line. (It did not work with the Kennedy assassination and it will not work in the age of information.) As the 9-11 Commission delivered the prescribed message, our leaders proclaimed that our enemies were evil personified and hated us "for our freedom."

In short, we buried the dead and paid lasting tribute to the lost but we were denied a satisfactory understanding of why the tragedy occurred.

In the ensuing years, rather than receiving assurances that we will not be struck again, we were given warning and warning, often on the most specious evidence, that terrorist attacks were imminent. We have engaged in two full-scale invasions and occupations on the pretense that military victories in foreign lands would increase security at home when a preponderance of evidence leads to exactly the opposite conclusion.

Now that those victories have been transformed into quagmires and America’s standing in the world has plummeted to an all-time low, we have been denied even irrational assurances that we are any safer now than we were before.

Then came Katrina.

The hurricane actually missed New Orleans but the levees were defective and there was no plan to evacuate the poor. As a result, according to Dr. Ivor van Heerden, Deputy Director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center, fifteen hundred drowned.

"They’re still finding corpses." [1]

One year later, in the lowlands of New Orleans, where jazz was born and nourished, where the heartbeat of a continent is most clearly felt, we have not even buried the dead.

Forgive me but this wound is still fresh.

Has ever a government demonstrated its lack of preparedness for disaster more clearly? Was it a lack of knowledge and information? Absolutely not. Reminiscent of Condoleezza Rice’s proclamation that no one could have imagined planes used as missiles when in fact everyone in the intelligence community was fully apprised of that probability, the collapse of New Orleans levees was one of the two or three most likely catastrophes in the nation.

Was it a lack of sensitivity? Without doubt. Five days into the disaster, with no meaningful federal presence on the ground in New Orleans (unless you count the security forces who blocked the way of citizen volunteers), it was beyond clear that the leader of our nation considered Katrina a public relations problem.

Was that insensitivity related to the color or class of the victims? No one can know the contents of a man’s heart but we saw what we saw, heard what we heard, felt what we felt and we may draw our own conclusions.

Our government utterly failed us in the hour of greatest need.

One year after Katrina, with much of New Orleans still resembling a war zone, with tens of thousands dispersed throughout the country, with the levees inadequately repaired (no less fortified), who among us is reasonably assured it will not happen again?

One year after Katrina, five years after 9-11, we are still afraid. We are still prone to nightmares, irrational panic, suspicion, mistrust and emotional outbursts. We are still insecure.

We remain a nation in mourning, a nation that cannot regain its balance in order to begin the healing, until our leaders finally come clean and begin to address our real and pressing needs.

Jazz.

[1] Dr. van Heerden quoted by Greg Palast in "Hurricane Expert Threatened for pre-Katrina Warnings," a special investigation for Democracy Now! 8/28/06.

JACK RANDOM IS THE AUTHOR OF THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES (CROW DOG PRESS) AND GHOST DANCE INSURRECTION (DRY BONES PRESS). THE CHRONICLES HAVE APPEARED ON DISSIDENT VOICE, THE ALBION MONITOR, BUZZLE, PEACE-EARTH-JUSTICE AND COUNTERPUNCH.