Three-Year's Lessons

East Biloxi House. Photo by David Weir.

Three years ago, my ex-girlfriend and I were sitting right here in my flat watching, horrified, the 24/7 hurricane coverage as Katrina flooded New Orleans. Like most people, here and around the world, we were outraged by the images of hundreds of thousands of poor residents who had been utterly abandoned by every level of government that should have been there for them.

The failure started at the top, where President Bush had diverted so many military and National Guard units to Iraq that there was no one to come to residents' assistance.

Meanwhile, with the national media diverted by the drama in New Orleans, few of us yet realized that Katrina had essentially destroyed vast areas of the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

In the aftermath of the storm, the failure by all levels of government intensified. When I visited Biloxi, where my girlfriend had relocated to help with relief efforts, three and then four months after Katrina, the devastation remained for all to see, and government relief agencies were nowhere to be seen.

Thanks to a wave of volunteers, mainly church groups, the storm's survivors were gaining a small slice of hope that someday they might again have homes and a rebuilt community.

We now know what the government officials were doing -- turning what used to be a vital East Biloxi residential community over to the multi-billion casino industry. One glaring example of what the priorities were: The reopening of the first big casino in January 2006, while many storm survivors still huddled in the ruins of their condemned houses, their cars, or in tents.

For avaricious businessmen and politicians, hurricanes represent not human tragedy but a new opportunity for "windfall" profits. The usual rules get suspended, courtesy of the the briefcases of cash that get transferred from lobbyists to politicians. Taking care of the victims who, in many cases have lost everything they had, is left to the good church people.

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Three years later, a much smaller hurricane (Category 2, not 5) is battering Louisiana and the Gulf Coast. This is the first time since Rita (which hit right after Katrina) that a tropical storm with hurricane-force winds has revisited this area.

Once the storm passes, and the dramatic TV coverage has ended, it will be imperative to monitor the new political economy that emerges in those areas hardest hit. If I were a betting man, I'd lay down money on who will be the winners and who will be the losers. That this is so easy to envision puts the essential lie to notion of a "natural disaster" -- there is nothing natural about the human pecking order in this society.

The game is rigged. The rich get richer; the poor get poorer. What is needed is a fundamental transformation of social values; what we'll get from the headline-seeking politicians who visit the scene of destruction will be pandering and empty promises.

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