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Title: “Finding” America Author: M. Treloar Date: July 1, 2007 Language: en Topics: United States of America, Hurricane Katrina, Bring the Ruckus Source: Retrieved on March 14, 2019 from https://web.archive.org/web/20190314161024/http://www.bringtheruckus.org/?q=node/37 Notes: This is a discussion document from Bring the Ruckus. It draws on the work from several individuals, but should not be seen as an official statement of the organization. M. Treloar is a member of Bring the Ruckus. He recently returned from Alabama, where he met with hundreds of Hurricane Katrina evacuees.
Before you read any further, let us suggest that you do a Kanye West.
That doesn’t just mean speaking the truth about President Bush. Words
alone would be cheap here. It means calling your agent and telling them
to send a big donation to grassroots organizations re-building.
Don’t have an agent? We’ll do their work and list several organizations
for you. You can figure out how to send the check, money order or
electronic funds transfer:
If you know of similar organizations in Southeast Asia doing work after
the tsunami and the recent earthquake, we would commend you for sending
help in those directions. This website is not written for liberals,
meaning those who think that sufficient money given to the “proper”
groups will make a difference. It is written for radicals and
revolutionaries in the United States who understand that fundamental
shifting of power and restructuring of societies are necessary and that
501(c)3 organizations will not be the social forces effecting those
changes.
But, in these circumstances, when groups that have been working for
years to bring about those power shifts have been devastated, sending
funds is an act of solidarity, not charity. To cite the experience of
only one, FFLIC, after their offices in New Orleans were destroyed by
Hurricane Katrina, their new facilities in Lake Charles, Louisiana, were
destroyed by Hurricane Rita. Some of their leadership have been forced
to move twice in the last fifty days and are still living in motel
rooms. They have not yet located all of their membership, much less the
members’ families in prison. Grassroots groups all over southern
Mississippi and Louisiana suffered similar fates.
Now read on with a clear conscience.
Bring the Ruckus members have visited evacuee camps and re-settlement
centers in several states. We have talked with several hundred evacuees
while attempting to gather information for FFLIC and get information on
contacting incarcerated family members to the evacuees scattered around
the South.
If the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) estimates (posted in
USA Today, 9/28/05) are to be believed—and those statistics are most
likely to be reliable, since they are based on applications for aid—then
over 1.3 million households are displaced. Given that we saw families
ranging up to ten people crammed into RVs in the camp, it is reasonable
to say that over two million people are now scattered across the U.S.,
mainly within 250 miles of New Orleans, in cities such as Houston,
Mobile, Atlanta and other southern towns.
It should be emphasized that no one, whether in FEMA or the Red Cross or
any news agency, has an accurate number for the evacuees. Due to the
criminal levels of incompetence within FEMA, widely acknowledged at
every level of society, many families have not checked back in with the
agency, especially after their initial interview. Undocumented workers
in many cases never checked in, knowing what likely awaited them.
Someday in the not-too-distant future, you will be moved to tears, when
a hip hop artist or playwright somehow taps into one of those FEMA
interviews with an over-worked bureaucrat listening to an evacuee
describe how their life and family has been destroyed, then handing them
a fistful of forms and then proceeding to tell them that no, the debit
cards will not be issued further and no, their rent will not be covered
and no, no and more no’s.
Despite their official posturing, the Red Cross does not know how to
contact hundreds of thousands of people or even where they are. In
Alabama the head official had no idea how many people were sited in the
state’s parks or had sought shelter with church groups. The widely
touted website for finding family members is not accessible for a large
portion of evacuees who did not use the Internet before Katrina, have
not been trained in accessing it in the months since and, in any case,
there are few laptops and no free wireless in the parks of rural Alabama
and Arkansas.
When one Bay Area Ruckus member sought assistance in locating families
with children in the correctional system of Louisiana, they were advised
by a Red Cross official in San Francisco to “leave this to the
professionals. When grass-roots groups get involved they’re likely to
mess it up.” As almost every non-Red Cross volunteer we talked to made
clear: if they had waited for FEMA or the Red Cross to take steps, there
would still be evacuees stuck in the Superdome waiting for food, water
and shelter. And, of course, nowhere has the Red Cross provided
information on the tens of thousands of prisoners located somewhere in
Louisiana. POWs (except those in Gitmo Bay) are guaranteed better
treatment than a sixteen-year-old who was awaiting trial on August
28,2005 in New Orleans.
(Lest this be read as criticisms of individual Red Cross personnel, we
have none. The volunteers we meet in camps and centers were some of the
nicest people one could imagine. The institutional racism and homophobia
of the Red Cross is being held up to the light of day in a number of
articles that are just now appearing in mainstream media).
There is now a diaspora in the United States, and it is not yet clear
whether, like those who fled the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, most of the
evacuees will attempt to settle where they are or where they can go soon
or return to the communities they were driven from.
This has consequences for the political battle that is now taking place
in New Orleans and for coming political battles in the U.S. In a dreary
repeat of the Great Flood of 1927, a small group of thirteen men
representing the ruling class is meeting almost daily to decide the fate
of New Orleans. Within a month or two we can expect the cover of
Business Week to be touting, “How New Orleans Will Be Rebuilt.” But
right now it is not clear that any other social force is ready or able
to put forth a contending vision and fight for it. Certainly without the
backing of the dispersed population, no one can claim to represent an
organized alternative. Despite some divisions within the ruling class
(for example, those representing petrochemical corporations are not as
concerned with the clean-up of the toxic sludge that covers every inch
of New Orleans as those representing entertainment and casinos), some of
their decisions are apparent even now from news reports. The mayor of
New Orleans, who sits on the group deciding the city’s future, announced
that half of the city’s workers have been laid off. This announcement
came just a day or two ahead of the news story that over 200,000 cars
will need to be hauled from within New Orleans and compacted, a task
that is supposed to take a year, given the ten crews currently assigned.
What are we to make of this? First, a sense of outrage should grab
anyone when they realize that transportation was available for every
single person who got caught within New Orleans by Katrina, including
the over 1,000 who were killed there. Brand-new cars that were sitting
on lots as well as empty city buses are now filled with sludge and
inoperable, good only for recycling, when they could have been driven
out of the city. Second, while towing vehicles is not an unskilled job,
how many of the thousands of city workers who are being laid off could
be trained in a week to drive a flat-bed or operate a tow truck?
Like the decision to keep the police on salary—after all, there are
still houses to be looted and Black people to be beaten—it is clear that
the cleaning and re-building of New Orleans will be conducted in such a
slow and deliberate manner as to guarantee that most of its population
will not be able to return, since they will have neither a place to live
nor a source of income in the next year.
This then, justifies FEMA’s announced plan to prepare for five-year
encampments. While on the one hand that announcement appears to be a
milestone of preparation and wisdom given FEMA’s track record, on the
other hand it means an abandonment of the city and surrounding areas to
re-population by those who were living there in late August 2005. Of the
1.3 million households scattered from Alabama to Alaska, how many can
afford to wait five years for the chance to return to a city where there
may be no jobs, social services have just been slashed to non-existence,
schools are not operating, and the neighborhoods that provided them with
community and culture may exist only as a Disney park? How many, except
those that have no other option, will choose to live in an RV in a
encampment where armed strangers (FEMA, state troopers, park rangers
and/or city police) will be able to come in at any time without a
warrant since, after all, it is a government-owned residence on
government property.
While not all of the evacuees will end up in the encampments, the
dispersal of them in church groups and rural areas has led to their
dismissal as a political and social force by those who are planning the
new New Orleans. After all, social movements in the U.S. know from
bitter experience that unless you are willing to show up at a government
office or factory gate with hundreds or thousands of people behind you,
any skilled official or bureaucrat or boss can dismiss your demand with
a simple: “You ain’t got no support.”
This is the problem facing those who are contending with the ruling
class of Louisiana and the South and the U.S. In order for the people to
be heard, the people must speak. While the attempts by Community/Labor
United to rally forces, both with the Peoples’ Hurricane Fund and their
organizing efforts, deserve the support of all progressive and radical
forces in the U.S., there are some steps that should be obvious to all
of us.
The first is simple and crucial. In every area where large groups of
evacuees exist, efforts must be made to give them a place where they can
speak without FEMA oversight. In the Bay Area, speak-outs were held in
Oakland within a few weeks after Katrina. In other areas, tens of
thousands of Katrina evacuees exist and could begin to meet and talk
outside the boundaries established by those with guns and forms. If for
no other reason, forums on the forthcoming February elections could be
held and centers for absentee balloting established.
This step would allow those who have the most compelling criticisms of
U.S. capitalism within the U.S. to put them before the world. It would
also insure that the questions that are being raised by others in their
name are actually voiced by those who suffered. While Minister Louis
Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam may be raising fundamental questions
about the racism that pervades the “rescue” efforts when he claims that
explosives were used to destroy the levees surrounding New Orleans,
Malik Rahim from Algiers asserts that “the only explosive they used was
greed.” The questions raised by Mike Davis in his “25 Questions about
the Murder of New Orleans” are an act of solidarity, but they are far
more compelling when they come fromthose who were inside the Superdome
or living in an encampment—and many of those same questions are being
raised there.
While there are numerous acts of solidarity that can be undertaken by
organizers in New York City and Los Angeles, speaking for the evacuees
is not one. Just as in the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee’s
self-creation over forty years ago, when one organizer successfully
demanded that only those who had gone to jail be allowed to vote on
strategy for the organization, so it is the case that only those who
lived and worked and suffered in New Orleans and Mississippi should be
speaking for the evacuees.
Second, as raised by FFLIC and every other social justice group in
Louisiana, the only functioning institution in Louisiana is the
corrections system. It is functioning to incarcerate those who were
arrested before Katrina and those who were arrested in attempts to
survive during Katrina and the aftermath. Yet it is not cooperating in
listing the names of the prisoners who are alive and accounted for,
whether they are children or adults. Every group that can raise its
voice should join in demanding that all the tens of thousands of
prisoners be accounted for immediately. The long Southern tradition of
losing prisoners when the levee breaks must be stopped.
And finally, we want to endorse, with some small changes, the words of
Texas Governor Rick Perry, when he was preparing the people of Texas for
Hurricane Rita, as reported in Time. The head of Texas Children’s
Medical Hospital informed him that they had to break into a warehouse to
“liberate a huge load of meat patties.” The governor told them, “Don’t
ask permission, ask forgiveness.”
This should be the call for amnesty for all who “found” necessary
supplies in the last weeks and are now facing criminal charges. But we
should not be forgiving any of the survivors of Katrina; we should be
honoring them.