People STILL just don't get it

I've been doing what I said I wasn't going to do today - watching the coverage on TV of the fifth anniversary of Katrina. And it did exactly what I knew it would do - upset me and make me really pissed off.

I wonder what would have been if we had not had the ineptitude in the White House and the mayor's office when Katrina hit. Of course, the happlessness made the election of Barack Obama and Mitch Landrieu possible. We can't change history, though; we have mostly moved on, as we must, but I'm still really angry and will never forget.

Other than the personal reasons, like losing my house and all my belongings that I had accumulated for 43 years, we then had to deal with people who literally threw every roadblock possible in our way to recovery - from Liberty Mutual saying they were "going to depreciate our house," and taking over 6 months to get us our insurance money, to Countrywide Mortgage saying they were going "to charge us to winterize our house" that was open to the elements (I always wondered who was going to do that?), to the SBA not wanting to give me a loan by myself because I am a married woman. And then there's the Corpse of Engineers. And the Corpse of Engineers. Oh, and don't forget - it was a natural disaster!

Still, we were alive, mainly due to our then next door neighbor, John McCusker, talking us out of staying; our house had never flooded, and we had even gone out to New Orleans East to buy a brand new generator. I always remember the people that did not survive, like a neighbor on Pratt Drive, who never got out of his attic. I remember the fact that I had a doctor's appointment the day of Katrina at Memorial Hospital. I remember the friends of mine who have died since the storm - many of them, I'm positive, from stress-induced illness. Sheebie died of pneumonia, after being evacuated. Sam died from Lymphoma, which she found out that she had shortly after moving from around the corner, in Gentilly, to Asheville, NC. She died 3 or 4 months later. Danielle died after getting an infection from minor surgery - I had just had dinner with her 2 or 3 weeks earlier. Johanna, John's wife, died just recently at 53, after having an aneurysm. There have been way too many of these unusual tragedies after Katrina, and I know there are people I'm just not remembering, at the moment.

These things still break my heart, and always will. What pisses me off is that people in the rest of the country still don't get it. I could hear it in the voice of a friend I talked to today in another part of the country. I said that we were upset today on the 5th anniversary of Katrina, and it was like, "that's nice; let me tell you what happened here." Katrina is old news.

We're all living in denial about the problems that we face in this country- we live in the age of the quick soundbite and Twitter. If we get bored with Katrina, or with pictures of poor African Americans starving to death at the Convention Center, we just flip the channel, giving these problems no thought. If we get tired of hearing about Louisiana and the Oil Spill, do we stop, or even reduce our driving? No - we hop right back into our Yukon and go to the mall, or even better, Wal-Mart.

Although I've been watching all over the TV today the hard work that the wonderful volunteers put in down here to rebuild houses, I wonder - can we put the hard work in to deal with our problems in the United States?! Do people understand that New Orleans is a bellweather for the rest of the country? Do we have enough of an attention span and education left to come up with inventive solutions for poverty, racism, education, and climate change? Or have we so systematically undereducated the populace that we would be more content with reruns of "The Real Housewives of New Jersey," or more coverage of Paris Hilton's drug bust?! It's hard - these things just plain hurt to think about - but think, we must, even with the possibility of being labeled "someone who can't get over it."