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Tuesday, September 06, 2005
Last Katrina post, I promise
As I feel many people are in the country I am starting to get “hurricane fatigue” in that I’m simply tired of talking about the week-old natural disaster, the mind-numbingly depressing aftermath, and the implications of it all. It’s what I’ve thought about the most over the past week and watched the most of on television. I must embarrassingly admit that the best field coverage on the usually integrity-challenged cable news networks came from FOX’s Shepherd Smith. A bit emotional at times but I simply cannot help but applaud his constant frustration at the whole situation which came to a head when he blew up during a live exchange with Bill O’Reilly on The Factor. I hereby nominate Shepherd and New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin as our next presidential administration. But I digress.
Tonight in my master’s pro-seminar course we talked a bit about Katrina in terms of progressivism, an anthropological theory that has society and culture progressing forward. At its extreme, progressivism holds (or held) that non-white races are in a lower stage of development that Europeans and that the latter is not necessarily the end of social progression but that were at least far more advanced artistically, intellectually and culturally. This really got me thinking.
Going back to Katrina I have written how much has been made of the fact that very little was done in the initial response to the subsequent flooding and displacement (and ultimately death) of thousands of Americans. There is a degree of progressivist thought that is very much alive today and that resulted in our being caught off guard by the aftermath of Katrina. By this I mean that traditionally the United States views itself as more advanced and thus somehow superior to most, if not all, other nations. While we do have the most powerful military and strongest infrastructure in the world our realization of this is simply out of control. This is nothing new. In the years following World War II Americans were indoctrinated with the idea that we were inherently better than other countries and that because we are able to help so many other nations we must constantly pat ourselves on the back. The obviousness of this doctrine has subsided a bit but the seed that was planed back then has sprouted and resulted in pure, unadulterated arrogance.
When we were hit below the belt on September 11th, we had an excuse: the Muslim world was jealous of us and our freedom and everything that we represented. Therefore, we must rise from the ashes of the World Trade Centers and show that we will not let our freedom fall at the hands of a few religious fundamentalists that don’t share our values. When Katrina hit we had no one to blame that resided outside the borders of the United States and thus outside of our comfort zone of a supremely-endowed way of life. Even 9/11 couldn’t do that because we had that outside entity to blame. We were caught completely off guard and for the first time in many years we became aware of our own vulnerability. All we could do as a nation is watch in horror as our own government failed us at many different levels. To an extent this could be said of 9/11: some “saw it coming” and could thus blame the government for lack of action, but Al Qaeda’s attack didn’t have the same visual obviousness as Katrina. We were one hundred percent sure that Katrina was going to attack the United States and that devastation would ensue.
Posted by Will at September 6, 2005 11:12 PM in In the News