Katrina

Last year on this day, the morning after I threw a bachelor party in L.A. for my friend Hung, I watched the storm on television with Hung, whose parents and siblings live on the eastside of New Orleans, in the Vietnamese district. Phones were out and we had no idea if his parents got out of the city. Last we had heard, his mother, stubborn, was refusing to flee. On tv, mother nature at her fiercest.

That afternoon, I flew back to Detroit and my sister picked me up at the airport. Exhausted, I fell asleep on her couch, convinced the storm's worst images had already aired. When I woke, the pictures on tv *had* gotten worse: disabled people on rooftops, dead bodies in the street, fights at the convention center.

In the final hours before Katrina hit, Hung's sisters convinced his parents to go stay with relatives in Baton Rouge. Miraculously, they made it out. Thousands did not. And one year later, many still are living in FEMA trailers. Thousands live with the memories of starvation, dehydration, violence and rape. Memories of scenes unfolding in one of the greatest cities in the richest country in the world. Scenes that definitively refute the myth that race and class do not dictate how we experience this society. Court records have been destroyed and many accused felons still sit in cells, twelve months later, awaiting justice. The police force remains grossly understaffed due to many cops being dismissed for malfeasance during Katrina and many more who never returned to the city after the storm.

Randy wrote two beautiful editorials for the Detroit Free Press. Check them out here.

Dateline NBC last night ran an hour-long encomium to Brian Williams, by Brian Williams, about Brian Williams. The special revealed how Williams

• arrived in N.O. before first responders
• represented valiantly "the people"
• took FEMA and Bush** and Nagin to task
  
• was hungry and thirty just like everybody else in the city
  

Interesting to see Katrina unfold through one person's eyes, but disheartening that NBC had to make ITSELF the story. And Williams too boldly proclaimed himself one of the sufferers ("we didn't have special helicopter drops with food just for the reporters"), although he also said he carried around cases of vienna sausage to barter with anybody who might attack him and admitted that he decided to move NBC out of the city and into the safer suburbs when he heard that CNN had done the same. So cases of sausage sat in NBC's van while people starved? He also glossed over the huge amounts of resources that he utilized during the two or three days after Katrina, including a group of armed police who circled him as he traveled through the city (hmmm, maybe those ten or twelve police could have been doing something else?).

**I'm paraphrasing here, but Williams's hard-hitting exchange with el presidente went something like this
Williams: "Some people say relief would have gotten to Kennebunkport more quickly"
Bush: "Call me anything you want but don't call me a racist"
Williams: "Okay"
Murrough would be proud.