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September 1, 2005

Coping with Katrina

Hurricane Katrina has erased my wife's native home and the current homes of most of her family, my many in-laws. We have spent three days finding family members by phone and internet, awed by the miracle of having the capability to personally attack that urgency, and profoundly sensitive to the fortune of finding all our loved ones alive, but without their homeland.

Even as relatives arrive by plane to stay with us and we struggle to begin the process of building their next chapter of life, the television relentlessly shows more lives still ending 24x7.

As the castrophe so far is just the tip of the iceberg, the trigger for multiple disasters, we are about to go through months of debate about both what should have been done and what should now be done.

This debate must not be misguided. As usually conducted, the outcome is predictable: unresolved. Worse, sometimes rightly and sometimes wrongly, frustrated heroes will blame victims and failed heroes will be blamed by self-appointed stakeholders, while the owners of different successes will argue over whose success is more meaningful. What a waste. We need better than that.

The hurricane has passed and most of us who have paid attention were relatively untouched. But few of us have lived through the cycle of loss and skepticism, frustration and cynicism, and finally despair and anger that is now the heart of this catastrophe and the most important of its several concurrent disasters.

Notably, as a society on the world stage, we are acknowledged geniuses at "gain", but often seen to be idiots at "loss". Nonetheless manifesting our genius, our culture of strength will for several months and longer appear regularly in the media, shown tested by our belief in compassion.

The news will indeed cover all successes of "The Recovery"... We'll be directed to our national pride, and driven by it. We'll hear a lot about Relief inspirations -- energy drawn from 9/11's spirit of self-respect and the Tsunami's spirit of selfless community. But inspiration is not enough.

What is the connection we now need to pull up above the essential ignorance? It is not will power. Finding lost people is not "heroic"; it is a moral imperative. Rebuilding quality of lives is not "prevailing"; it is the distinguishing feature of a society. And compassion will not be enough. In fact, because it will be exercized on a personally discretionary basis, prioritized pragmatically and emotionally, it will be readily and inevitably politicized. We'll also have a tendency to try to do things that we thought worked before, and we'll need to "take what we can get". But meanwhile, what this is really all about now is understanding abandonment because without that, we'll have outlasted the catastrophe but not ended the disaster.

The ability to understand not *what* gets left behind but *who* gets left behind, not *what* people recover but *who* gets to be a have-not -- and why: this understanding is a kind of certainty that too many victims of Katrina already believe they intuitively have. For them, the ongoing disaster is not about how rescues fail, it's about why rescues for them fail. Until proven otherwise, the catastrophe proves something that they already knew.

The rope non-victims climb up to acknowledging this is the same length as the rope needed to reach down to the abandoned. As each of us takes steps to deal with Katrina in some way, whether through personal or group effort, private or corporate, friends or legislators, note that the importance you attach to your steps is measurable by whether it helps the rope to get shorter.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at September 1, 2005 11:58 AM

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