The words come in a drumbeat:Congressman John Lewis of Georgia, in a heartbroken opinion editorial, laments that "I've cried a lot of tears the past few days as I watched television -- to see somebody lying dead outside the convention center. This reminded me of Somalia. But this is America."
"This is a shell-shocker. I never saw anything like this in Afghanistan. I can't believe this is America," said U.S. Army Veteran Warren Ezell, voicing a refrain repeated among his brother and sisters in arms, home from the perils of the Middle East to destruction of Katrina.
And average Americans helplessly chant the questions, at an utter loss. "This is America? People have been dying on the streets of New Orleans -- on American soil -- with no food and water?" reads a letter to the editor in the Detroit Free Press.
This is America?
It's become a mantra of sorts in the two weeks since Hurricane Katrina. We shake our heads at the newspapers, the televisions, and, heartbroken, ask if this can be America. People dying for want of food, water and proper medical attention, exploited by those criminals who capitalize on the chaos and sold short by those officials entrusted with alleviating it, do not fit in our national self-image. This is America?
Through the scripted noise of sanctimonious government talking points about people choosing to ignore the warnings to evacuate came the truth that people who desperately wanted to get out couldn't get out. And we say this is America? But this chasm of rich and poor, where socioeconomic standing determines who lives and who dies, is exactly what America looks like on a daily basis. Katrina hit right before payday; in a country where a third of workers survive paycheck to paycheck, how could we have possibly expected efficacy out of an evacuation plan that depended on an individual's access to a car and a full tank of gas?
Census figures released two weeks ago show that poverty rates have increased for the fourth year in a row, up 12.7 percent since 2003, to 37 million Americans living in poverty, and Katrina has merely exposed a truism in modern America: Being poor is a health hazard. Low-wage workers disproportionately represent the uninsured, and Americans at the bottom end of the earnings spectrum are almost five times as likely to be in fair to poor health as towards the middle and top. Poverty doubles the risk of dying from heart disease. Cancer patients without insurance are less likely to receive surgery, chemotherapy or radiation treatment. The dead bodies floating down flooded New Orleans streets are casualties of being poor, and so are hundreds of other Americans each year.
We looked at the pictures of the Superdome and saw a sea of dark faces, and it seems impossible to conceive that a country half a century after Brown v. Board is still so segregated. And we say this is America? Yet shock is hardly in order, when the face of the urban poor is still so overwhelmingly black, when segregation is still a way of life in almost every major city. One in four African-Americans lives in poverty. More than 70 percent of the nation's black students now attend predominantly minority schools, and the prisons into which those classrooms all too often feed are equally unequal.
The newspaper photo captions that call white people leaving decimated storefronts "survivors" and black people doing the same "looters" are merely reflecting the way our criminal justice system looks at race. African-Americans make up 15 percent of drug users and 37 percent of prisoners incarcerated for drug use; how absurd to expect that crimes of hurricane-induced desperation should be judged any differently. Our nation's cities are characterized by patterns of segregation and gentrification. A disaster of this magnitude in New York, Washington, D.C. or Chicago would yield the same demographic group left behind.
It would be unforgivably callous to belittle the suffering of those whose lives were devastated or cut short by Hurricane Katrina. The fact that misery and inequity exists on such a vast scale in this country should not lessen our sympathy for everyone -- regardless of race, class, or privilege -- affected by this unprecedented tragedy. Yet as we sift through the wreckage of the Gulf Coast, searching for responsibility and accountability in order to prevent this sort of disaster from happening ever again, we'd be well served to remember that this sort of disaster happens every day in miniature.
We have got to stop saying "this is America" as though it's part of the question of how could this happen, because it's not. It's the answer. Yes, this is America laid bare, and the outpouring of grief for what has happened to our nation should not stop at the water's edge.
Katie Cristol's column usually appears Mondays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at kcristol@cavalierdaily.com.
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