Twenty years since Katrina devastated the neighborhoods of New Orleans

One of the opening disasters of the 21st Century and a harbinger of disasters to come, was Katrina the category 5 hurricane that drove 25 feet of water into the neighborhoods of New Orleans and swallowed up the homes of half a million people and drowned and killed nearly 2000. New Orleans had withstood hurricanes before but this one was different, and this one was the opening salvo of the barrage of natural disasters to come: wildfires, mudslides, rising sea levels, drought - the consequences of climate change.

The Documentary KATRINA; COME HELL AND HIGHWATER, on Netflix gives a comprehensive picture of the before, during and after events that unfolded when that hurricane came ashore at New Orleans. This is superb docuemtary art - it blends the individual human experience with the wider media contxext and societial conditions to give a more fully informed view of the catastophe.

FULLY INFORMED - increasingly, the concept of being 'fully informed' has had less currency and 'emotionally driven' is the more operant fuel. Once an acquaintance and I were talking about how to know what is real or true in this age of misinformation, and I said that I use mulitple sources and compare. So, for instance, I get news from abc, New York Times, BBC, PBS, Cnn, and even the Guardian! Also, I subscribe to a news magazine called THE WEEK which surveys different news sources. She was a devotee' of Fox news and that was her only source of news bolstered by 'facebook' which in her life, as in many of others I have known, had become almost an addiction. Facebook was filling the lonely hunger for human interaction in lives where family, friends and neighborhood, had disappeared.

The power of Katrina took out the levees and canals that protected the low lying areas where the mainly Black neighbohoods were located and since they were in what was kind of a geological bowl, their houses were drowned in a25 foot storm surge from Lake Pontchartrain. People took refuge in attics and an rooftops, but houses were lifted from their foundations adn floated away tilting and dropping off the roof riders. Houses hit debris piles and tipped over.

The people who evacuated and took refuge at the SuperDome athletic structure were left abandoned, no food or water or medical assisstance. People who were sent to the Convention Center for promised transport out, were also abandoned there without food or water, to die of dehydration, sickness, and lack of basic medicines for their conditions such as insulin for diabetes.

It is no accident that the horror fell mainly on Black families who had lived in those poorer districts, and no surprise that the government that was supposed to protect and save them was nowhere to be found, left in disarray and chaos except to send in troops to stop "Looting" which mainly consisted of people trying to get water and food from stores to bring to their families. Our own troops paid for by our own tax money pointing their guns at their own people during a disaster.

We all remain woebully unprepared for natural disasters which are guaranteed to increase and eventually come to us all as the government is in chaos and those in charge are not only uniformed but willfully ignorant of the impact of global warning. We have seen that at our New Jersey Seashore towns. Willfully ignorant builders are still allowed to put up and sell structures on barrier islands that are vulnerable to hurricanes and that also destroy the natural vegetation that would protect the sand banks without the developments. Like our politicians, these profit seekers place financial gain ahead of everthing else so that they can buy bigger houes, more cars, ostentatious displays of excess wealth.

It is the end of the summer and once again many of us watched the movie JAWS a summer classic and once again we saw the same contest between greed and the safety of people put into contest. This contest between the impulse to greed and hoarding against the impulse toward protection and care for our fellow beings has played out thorughout human history. It appears that currently, Greed and selfishness are in power. Love and care, however, are always to be found and are powerful forces That's where hope comes in.

Note: there are things we can all do - plant trees instead of poisoning your yard to make a perfect lawn which profits no one and poisons our water supply. Think of paying a little more and using bamboo sourced toilet paper and paper towels. Vote down efforts to transport dangerous chemicals through our towns such as the controversy raging over transporting Liquid Natural Gas on our local small town train lines. And even more importanty GET INFORMED AND STAY INFORMED and don't limit yourself to the emotional hook of the propaganda channel Fox (owned by the greedy billionair Murdock). Rich people do not honor the social contract. They don't pay their fair share of taxes and they don't care about their fellow man, they only care about other rich people and their status in regard to them.

Last comment: family, friends and community. One of the things I took from the documentary was how important these three relationships are and in particular in times of trouble. wrightj45@yahoo.com. People banded together to help each other survive, and in the aftermath, to help build new lives. And the most important things lost was the family connection, people were separated from their loed ones and struggled to locate them again after it was over. It reminded me of the lines of dusty foot traffic after the Emancipation in 1863 where people walked from town to town, plantation to plantation to locate their loved ones who had been sold off from them. If there is a moral, it is LOVE - love our earth, love one another, and pay attention to what is going on around you!

Happy Trails wrightj45@yhaoo.com