Psychological violence against the survivors

I began the below post on Saturday but never published it. I’ll publish it now but first this:

Plan to Move Astrodome Evacuees on Hold

By JIM VERTUNO, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 52 minutes ago (9/6/2005)

AUSTIN, Texas – A plan to move some Hurricane Katrina evacuees from the Houston Astrodome to cruise ships was postponed Tuesday because many didn’t want to go, and a proposed airlift of refugees out of strained Texas appeared to be on hold after the federal government took over.

Officials had planned to begin moving about 4,000 evacuees on Tuesday to cruise ships docked at ports on the Gulf of Mexico.

However, officials of the Hurricane Katrina Houston Response announced Tuesday that the plan was delayed.

Incident Commander Joe Leonard said some people brought to Houston from the Louisiana Superdome want to stay where they are to concentrate on locating lost loved ones. Others want stability after having to evacuate their homes, being forced to endure squalid conditions in the Superdome and then being moved again to Texas.

“The ‘Dome is home for them,” Leonard said in a statement. “For residents, another immediate relocation is simply too much, too soon.”

I noted in the below unposted post that the survivors were going through a series of catastrophic breaks, not just one, each displacement being another stressful break for them.

And then there’s the story too of the little boy who was shown on television last week losing his little dog “Snowball”, he not permitted to evacuate with it. There were many such stories but this was the one that got the airplay and thus the outpouring of sympathy:

The boy was among the thousands sheltered at the Superdome after the hurricane. But when he went to board a bus to be evacuated to Houston, a police officer took the dog away. The boy cried out — “Snowball! Snowball!” — then vomited in distress. The confrontation was first reported by The Associated Press. Authorities say they don’t know where the boy or his family ended up.
Source: Pet lovers search for dog torn from youngster’s arms

I noted in a couple of other posts over the past week the break of compassion that came with tearing beloved pets from the arms of these individuals. People who had carried their pets through flood waters, who had saved them, demonstrating how pets are a part of the family. And it’s demeaning and psyshologically violent to disrupt those bonds.

Anyway, here’s the posting that I never made.

* * * * * * * *

This was early evening yesterday, somewhere around 5 or 6.

I had been reflecting on the survivors of Katrina not being permitted to take their belongings with them on the buses, taking another pass by this.

Evacuees continue to board buses at the New Orleans Convention Center, with many people filing past corpses to make their escape. Conditions are crowded and many people have had to leave bags full of belongings at the side of the road because there’s no room. National Guardsmen are providing security at the center. They’re confiscating knives and letter openers from people before they board.

So, I was writing and reflecting on how you make it to the Convention Center with a few bags of belongings, all that you have left in the world. And you keep those belongings with you, camping out with them through the horrors and humiliations. What’s in those bags? Family photos? Clothes? The children’s favorite toys? Who knows? But after five days, if you thought you were attached to those items before, now that you pretty well know they’re all that’s materially left of your former world, they’re going to be pretty important to you.

Then finally comes the bus that’s going to carry you to your new temporary life. You line up with the rest and what do you hear? Another break. Your last belongings. You can’t take them with you. Those few things in those bags. You have managed to save them from the waters of the flood and you know leaving those belongings on the street they will now become garbage and be buried with the hellish refuse that’s turned the street into a landfill. The flood didn’t claim your belongings, the government that has come to save you does that job. In exchange for your belongings you get patted down and if you’re stepping on a yellow school bus you’re taken god knows where. They weren’t telling the yellow schoolbus people where they were going. The survivors would ask and they wouldn’t tell them. If you are a survivor loaded on a school bus you were headed to the airport that was going to fly you to parts unknown.

Families were separated in this way. Children who had suffered the flood were torn from parents. Husbands were separated from wives. Family separated from family. And no one was keeping track on who was going where. Total chaos.

Imagine making it through the flood only to be severed from family.

How many are reading who have lost everything? There is a crisis of identity that come with this. We become attached to our things. On the simplest of levels, it’s a crisis of identity when you put on another person’s clothing. Another person’s shoes. That’s just the way it is. And it’s not vanity.

These people are going through serial breakages. First they lose their home. At the Convention Center, at the Superdome, they likely formed bonds with the people seated around them. Probably some intense bonds, because they went through a catastrophic time together. You know they looked out for each other. Bonds that were broken when they stepped on the bus. If they were taken to the airport they formed another brief bond with the community they found themselves in. Another bond that was broken when they are put on a plane. Or maybe you ride one of the commercial buses that takes you to the Astrodome. Where you are going to be staying for a while. Perhaps you have children with you. Has the reader seen pictures of how close these people are packed into the Astrodome? And completely exposed. It’s one thing for an adult to deal with no privacy, but it is tremendously difficult on children. They need their down time. They need…

And there my reflecting stopped this afteroon. At about 5 or 6 pm.

Because I looked up and who was sitting there in the WWLTV makeshift studio with Bobby Jindal but Tom Delay.

The last face I expected to see in the WWLTV studio in Baton Rouge was Tom Delay. Not in his Sunday-go-to-meeting-suit either. A sports shirt. Looking rather relaxed, for Tom Delay.

What was really weird is that his voice was completely different from DC Tom Delay. I haven’t listened to Tom Delay much but this was not his podium voice. Hardly sounded like him at all. Not near as profound an accent.

He talked about how driving over to Baton Rouge he saw a “beautiful pick-up” with the bumper sticker “Get it done”. He said he was there in Baton Rouge because that’s where all the decisions were being made. And he was interested in breaking down the bureaucratic walls.

He wasn’t there to see the devastation, he’d seen that on television. No, he was looking at the big picture. The planning being done. There was a need to give hope to those who had lost their homes and loved ones. He was gathering information because they were going to be working on legislation on getting people their needs.

And then my live streaming of WWLTV in its makeshift studio with its hurricane-worn anchors and all the raw interviews and press briefings went away, the screen went black, and after a minute up pops canned CNN with its commercials and actors and stagey news and I cut it off.

DeLay: Terrorism preparedness needs review

09/04/2005

By SUZANNE GAMBOA / Associated Press

Republican Leader Tom DeLay said Saturday the nation’s terrorism preparedness needs review in light of the Hurricane Katrina disaster.

DeLay was in Baton Rouge visiting the Louisiana state emergency center where government agencies have set up their command and control.

He said in a phone interview that he would meet with Secretary Michael Chertoff to discuss how the country deals with disaster and that the issue will be on Congress’ agenda when it reconvenes Tuesday.

“The biggest problem we are having right now is command and control, who is in charge, who is making decisions, who is in position for leadership,” said DeLay, of Sugar Land.

He refused to join those who have criticized President Bush and said the response was too slow.

“I think it’s unfortunate people are spending time and energy criticizing right now,” he said. “We should be thinking constructively how we fix the problems on the ground and make decisions that need to be made for these people who have lost everything.”

DeLay said he went to Baton Rouge to look at the chain of command and help knock down bureaucratic barriers that may be preventing assistance from getting to storm-ravaged areas.

He also said he wanted to “get a hands-on feeling” of what Congress will need to work on in the coming days and weeks to help provide relief and begin recovery.

All right. Sounds nice and fine and good, providing relief and beginning recovery. Doesn’t it?

I read that many people, after waiting those hellish days for the bus, rather than chancing missing a bus and stepping out of line to find a place to relieve themselves, soiled their clothing.

This is another humiliation that’s part of the psychological violence (much less the physical violence of their abandonment) perpetuated against these survivors.

They were stranded on the streets for days. No portalets. Human excrement piling up to the knees, I read. The Convention Center could be smelled two blocks away. At the Superdome, after the bathrooms filled with excrement, then the stairwells filled with excrement. The stench was overpowering.

“Treated like animals.”

Several weeks ago I posted on a story about a panic that ensued in Richmond Virginia in a rush for cheap laptops. Interestingly, it really was initiated to a good degree by the Henrico County school system and officials in their poor handling of the event.

I for two reasons think of that story now. One, there was a woman who relieved herself in her clothing rather than lose her place in the line for the laptops. This was not done for fear of losing one’s place on a bus out of hell where you might very well die if subjected to another night. This was for a laptop.

The other reason I think of it is, for sake of laptops, people were screaming and pushing each other, a child’s stroller was crushed in the stampede, an elderly man was thrown to the ground, a person tried to drive their way through the crowd, and a young man had brought along a folding chair and was walloping people with it who tried to cut in line before him. He said, “I took my chair here and I threw it over my shoulder and I went ‘bam’…They were getting in front of me and I was there a lot earlier than them, so I thought that it was just.”

As I wrote earlier in the week, it’s amazing the violence that didn’t happen in New Orleans as a result of the horrors the survivors were subjected to by the government’s lack of response. And people were criticizing them for rage, for outbursts? National Guardsmen telling them to “act like adults”? People who, when sufficent water and food arrived finally on Friday, coincident with Bush’s visit, I read peacefully and automatically formed 6 long lines for the provisions?

People go into a stampeding panic over laptops and the survivors of New Orleans are criticized for essentially not behaving like robots.

This is racism.

There’s surprise at any sort of “civil disobedience” or violence–and I’m not even talking about the thugs, I’m talking about the criticism of the survivors.

Those survivors were damn heroic, suffering through what they did without the situation blowing skyhigh.

It’s interesting that the laptop fracas was created by the school system. I’d used that story to introduce some ideas of Kenneth Ehrenberg’s on social structure and responsibility, on competition and capitalism.

“Whoever has more resources is far more likely to win a contest, thus giving her even more resources for the next contest, and so on until the opponent is utterly vanquished or someone steps in to stop the competition.” [FN22]

*15 One of the upshots of our particular brand of competitive capitalism is that it is not marked by fair competition. People do not start out on the same starting line; some start miles ahead of others. Yet, we still see ourselves as in competition with each member of society for “scarce” resources. As a result, we have strong structural disincentives from trying to rearrange our institutions so that individuals may at least start from similar points. Included here is the point made above: that we are unwilling to help those far below for fear that others, in closer proximity to us, will surpass us. Furthermore, this point helps to explain why it is so difficult for our system to arrive at a more equitable distribution, or for the winners of one generation to be the losers of another. Generally, those on the bottom in one generation will be on the bottom the next, at least without the intervention of an extraordinary amount of luck. [FN23] While it is true that certain segments of the population are able to better their condition through slow and steady improvements across generations, they are still doing so (for the most part) at the expense not of those above them, but of those below them. Hence: “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.”

Hence, those with the resources having the ability to flee the hurricane and those without, primarily black, impoverished, frail, elderly, without economic and/or physical resources, being left behind.

And the posting boiled down to some reflections on supporting self-esteem rather than killing it. I quoted the following.

As a concept, self-esteem is extremely useful for those trying to understand why people act as they do. As a reality, the importance of high self-esteem simply cannot be overstated. It might be thought of as the sine qua non of the healthy personality. It suggests a respect for and faith in ourselves that is not easily shaken, an abiding and deep-seated acceptance of our own worth. Ideally, self-esteem is not only high but unconditional; it does not depend on approval from others, and it does not crumble even when we do things that we later regret. It is a core, a foundation upon which life is constructed. [FN36]

Given this importance, it is a wonder we do not do more to build a robust sense of self-esteem in our educational system.

Source: Loyola Poverty Law Journal, Spring, 1999, SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND RESPONSIBILITY, Kenneth Ehrenberg

Again, it’s interesting that the school system does a poor job with self esteem, often times squashing it, and that the laptop riot was caused by poor planning on the part of a school system selling its computers for a low price, creating apparently ripe conditions for an outrageous competitive stampede and self-debasement.

And then look at what Homeland Security did to the survivors of Katrina. It denied them Red Cross and not just creature comforts but essential, life-saving, food and water, saying it would attract more people to come to New Orleans and to want to stay there. They didn’t deliver portalets. They didn’t deliver medical care. They humiliated and debased the survivors, treating them, as the survivors say, like “animals.”

To those without the resources to escape the flood, they said, no, you can’t take your few salvaged belongings with you, no you can’t take your rescued pets with you. They essentially said you have no rights, you are just a body.

The bodies that fell they let lie there, the dead amongst the living.

Psychological violence. Besides the disaster of the non-evacuation, the survivors were subjected to one after another acts of psychological violence against them.

And the government dares to say that their focus, their priority was with the living??? Bush dares to say that every life is precious to him?

Tom Delay says of any criticism of Bush, “I think it’s unfortunate people are spending time and energy criticizing right now.” And adds, saying of survivors who were forced upon boarding buses to leave their few salvaged possessions behind, “We should be thinking constructively how we fix the problems on the ground and make decisions that need to be made for these people who have lost everything.”

Well, I’m not buying it. The government many not have killed these people but it has done what it can to deconstruct them.