This essay was originally published on TomDispatch.

Out of the Tropical Waters: Hurricane Katrina

The young members of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) at Camp Casey that day were restless and uneasy. A number of them had been members of the National Guard who had joined up to serve their communities, not fight foreign wars. They deplored the large Louisiana National Guard contingent stranded in Iraq with massive quantities of equipment of just the sort needed at home. They anticipated a disaster. So did the National Weather Service, whose warnings were dire, the mayor of New Orleans, who implemented a deeply flawed evacuation plan, Louisiana's governor, who issued a state of emergency declaration on Friday, August 26, and many others.

Perhaps one should say that many anticipated the disaster that was the weather, and some anticipated the social disaster to follow-- notably Mike Davis, whose September 2004 Tomdispatch began, "The evacuation of New Orleans in the face of Hurricane Ivan looked sinisterly like Strom Thurmond's version of the Rapture. Affluent white people fled the Big Easy in their SUVs, while the old and car-less--mainly Black--were left behind in their below-sea-level shotgun shacks and aging tenements to face the watery wrath."

A prescient article in National Geographic magazine overestimated the death toll from such a hurricane but described quite accurately the million displaced and the poisonous brew of sewage, oil and industrial effluent to come. No one, however, anticipated just how adrift the Bush Administration would find itself in its own toxic brew of callousness, cluelessness and incompetence--or that a public and media that had largely overlooked those very qualities before would suddenly find them intolerable. The death and devastation was a tragedy foretold, but the sudden shift of political wind was something else--a surprise.

Like 9/11, the hurricane "changed everything." Katrina was not just a disaster on a grander scale than 9/11, but one that woke up the country from the strange sleep it fell into after that first atrocity. When the World Trade Towers came down, most of this country's citizens fell under a spell, cowed, obedient, unquestioning of the patriotic haze in which we marched to war. Katrina blew that haze away. The aftermath offers a second chance to set the nation's priorities, even to redefine what strength and safety would really look like for this country. There was an amazing window, a moment in which tax policy, privatization, the whole social-Darwinist, every-man-for-himself ideology of Horatio Alger and Ronald Reagan, the very definition of national security and more was open to question; in which a new national sense of purpose and identity could have been crafted and the prevailing agenda of the last twenty-five years seen as the disaster that has hit every corner of the United States. An opposition party could have made much of it, but we had instead the Democrats. Though I'd be happy to be wrong, it's hard to imagine any great surprises coming from them. Hope for me has always lain outside electoral politics in that arena where grassroots movements create irresistible pressure on institutions or change the world without working through those institutionalized forces.

Three surprises, all with ties to wonder and to horror, the one transmuting into the other: extinction as a black cloud out of which a bird flies; a mother's anguish becoming the one weapon that can pierce the presidential armor and maybe thereby save lives; the destruction of a city and region that drags down an administration with it and maybe hastens the end of a war. It makes you wonder where we'll be in 2006.

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