Home (Bitter) sweet Home

Hello faithful blog readers, all 8 or 9 of you out there. Anybody still with me after my months' long hiatus must be a true diehard. I thank you for still believing that life here could be of interest to you, if only for a few minutes. Part of the reason I have not put fingers to keyboard in so long is that things have NOT been that interesting of late. Life here during winter has been something of a routine, even a rut. There's only so many times I can talk about the chill that seeps past a half dozen layers of clothes and embeds itself in your bone marrow, a cold that rips the scab off of exposed and tired cliches. Old Man Winter himself said the hell with it after coming here and flew south to Florida, or Dubai, anywhere but here.

Dark, dank, and depressing winter has been part of my writing stoppage, but the real reason came, ironically enough, from my R&R trip home, back to Louisiana, in January and February. I had a chance to catch up with family and friends (especially MaLan -- nice to remember, "oh yeah, that's what married couples do!"), see a few movies, pig out on Cajun food. It was a great couple of weeks.

Even so, when I got back here, depression was the order of the day. Part of that is weather induced, definitely, but it was more than that. I was having a hard time coming to terms with what was left of Louisiana.

My first taste of this was Lake Charles, where I grew up and where my folks live, the major city affected by Hurricane Rita. The Continental Express jet flew in low, and for miles and miles all I could see were these funky blue roofs. As the plane got closer, I realized they were tarps, provided courtesy of FEMA. The tarps are everywhere (still, if I hear correctly from my mom).

As we drove around town, many of the trees had been snapped in half, like twigs, toothpicks, matchsticks, you pick your own frail piece of wood analogy here. The pine trees were the main victim, but some of the august old oak trees themselves gave in to the pressure. Ironically enough, the oldest oak in town, a giant ancient behemoth with the metal rings still embedded where it had been chained down in advance of Hurricane Audrey back in 1957, is still there. There seemed to be a convention of RV'ers around, as every third driveway or so has a square, squatty FEMA trailer or a nicer trailer filling up space. People are living in these makeshift accommodations until the can get a contractor to come work on their house. (Free advice to good contractors in other parts of the U.S. -- the supply of good contractors is low, demand is high, you have a great opportunity there for the next year or so.) My sister's home emerged relatively unscathed, but it was only last month, six months after the event, that somebody could re-roof my folks' house, and they are still waiting for the rest of the house repairs to this day.

I did not hear any wild stories about people riding out the full fury of the storm, because local, state, and federal officials got it right, and got people out of the storm's path (contrast this to Katrina, but more on that later). I am sure some people did, but I did not hear them, which means they did not rise to the level of international news interest -- a good thing. What I did hear was the aftermath.

My uncle, his son and daughter-in-law, the first to return, going back and cleaning out freezers that had gone without power for weeks. Latex gloves, surgical masks, whatever, provided little respite to shrimp that had been allowed practically to ferment. I would like to think that my exposure to durian in SE Asia (called the "king of fruit") and to stinky tofu in China (tofu left outside to ferment for almost a month) would serve as preparation for this kind of smell, but I am glad I won't have to test that theory.

Lake Charles is coming back. The casinos are back in operation, and somehow people continue to have money to gamble. (Lake Charles benefits from Houstonians who come down for the weekend and drop a load or two of dough.) Restaurants and movie theaters opened while I was there in February. That said, no one seems to be able to operate with anything close to normal business hours. McDonald's and Burger King, two stalwarts for high school kids needing some pocket money, are offering signing bonuses, benefits, and salaries up to $9 an hour, to FLIP BURGERS. That is more than twice what I was getting (no bene's either) working at LSU in college. I'm no longer hip what minimum wage is, but I know $9 is way above that. (I hear New Orleans is offering even more.) Why? Simple -- the workforce that normally would take such jobs has been coasting on FEMA emergency money, and, rather than put that money to work for them by investing, getting a down payment on a home or car, anything, these folks decided to give themselves a breather until the FEMA money is gone.

My wife and I did make a day trip down to New Orleans, to see what was left of my adopted city of New Orleans, which suffered the catastrophic losses from the storm that everyone else remembers, Hurricane Katrina. Katrina did horrific damage, but ironically enough, most of the damage the hurricane itself inflicted happened in Mississippi, which, like Lake Charles, is slowly bouncing back, partially with the help of gambling revenue. No, the worst damage in New Orleans, unfortunately, can be attributed to human frailty. Hmm, where to start -- the levees were not strong enough to withstand a Category 3 hurricane (as advertised), much less a Cat 5; federal, state, and local officials had gone through a hurricane simulation with "Hurricane Pam" which predicted 10,000 deaths, and still did nothing; no one bothered to help New Orlean's poor, folks who by and large did not have cars they could use to evacuate, to get the hell out of dodge; many people with capacity to leave ignored the advice of local officials, and also ignored the advice about stockpiling food, water, etc., expecting that this was someone else's problem; I could go on.

You saw the images. Bodies floating by in the mocassin-infested, broken-refinery polluted Mississippi River overflow. People stranded on the roof of their home. Thousands of people living in squalor or worse, whether at the Superdome, on highway overpasses, any high ground they could find. In my mind it looked more like Bangladesh and less like "the most powerful country in the world." What a joke.

My wife and I got a chance to see much of that. Where Lake Charles was knocked down, it seems to be picking itself back up again. I got no such vibe from New Orleans. Things remain in limbo, waiting on 1) when and how the Federal Government will rebuild the levees; 2) which homes still standing but uninhabitable will be condemned; 3) shop, businessowners, residents, to return. Lots of other things remain unclear as well. A plan put forward for rebuilding New Orleans met howls of controversy, and cries of "racism," as many of the buildings recommended for demolition are in those parts of New Orleans that were in the lowest parts of the city, where historically poor black neighborhoods built up over generations. Why? Economics as a main driver -- the poor in New Orleans built where they could afford, the least costly, least desirable land in the city.

As painful as it was to drive around and see what looked more like a war zone than where I live, which is a war zone (even while my corner of it is pretty peaceful, thank goodness), what really cut to the core was to listen to people, which exposed some raw and ugly images of my home. Racism is alive and well. There is a video making the rounds of the internet, a collage of images from Katrina done to the modified lyrics of the old "Battle of New Orleans" song. The song is offensive -- straight up. What's really sad, though, is that it evokes a grim chuckle from many (white) people in Louisiana now, including me, although it is more depressing than funny. Some of the lame comments by the New Orleans mayor, that God meant New Orleans to be a "chocolate city" (i.e. majority black, others need not apply) do not exactly help the situation, either. (Given that New Orleans has been a racial mixing pot for centuries, with Creole and others, such statements from a public leader are particularly unhelpful).

Some of the outre actions done by some of the Katrina refugees has added fuel to the racism fires, though. One story in particular got a lot of airplay of an unwed mother, living in a hotel in Beaumont Texas, who took her FEMA grant and went on a shopping spree, to the tune of many thousands of dollars. Not surprisingly, this does not go over very well with hardworking people (black or white), reinforcing stereotypes that have long been in existence about "welfare queens" and single moms.

The things I heard, the things I saw, they really shook me up. I've been trying to digest as much of it as I can ever since I got back. I can only say I've gleaned two things from this entire, shameful episode in my nation's, my state's history.

Many of the Katrina "refugees" act much the same as refugees here in Afghanistan -- focused on survival, focused on the immediate present, little trust or respect for the system in place. We might hope that folks in those types of situations could take any assistance given (and there are countless examples of it -- think of Shaquille O'Neal renting a bunch of tractor trailers, filling them up with relief supplies, and driving them down to Louisiana, as just one of many acts of charity and kindness) and use it to build a future. To do that you need to care about the future, you need to think and operate on a longer-term basis than day-to-day existence. People need ownership in their own lives, in their own future, before they will care about the future and act in a way that affects their future. The best vehicles for giving people such ownership, in my view, are almost all internal, i.e. family, faith, community. I seem to remember Sen. Clinton said that "it takes a village" to raise a child. I agree. Compare Vietnamese refugees, who one generation on, have integrated fairly well into society, with what we saw in Katrina's wake. When they arrived in the U.S. in the late 1970's, they had nothing but the clothes on their back. In many places, they faced severe discrimination and mistrust (as the Vietnamese shrimpers in Louisiana still do). Yet, even so, a generation on, Vietnamese people are fairly integrated into the fabric of American life. Why? This is a function more of their own internal foundations, through family and community, than anything the U.S. Government ever did.

It is preferable in my view to create that foundation at its most basic unit, the family, but if the family cannot create such a foundation, one can still be built. The best tool for that is education. Education can be a massive equalizing force, for people with the determination and dedication to acquire knowledge. Education certainly has helped me succeed beyond my own expectations, which were pretty sizable.

Too bad the state of education in the U.S. today is so uneven, so unequal, never mind the "no child left behind" act. How to equalize? Good question, since you cannot dictate that property values (and thus, property taxes, which serve as the base for most communities' education spending) be equal for all -- that just won't happen in a free economy. It should not come as a surprise to anyone, however, that education is one of the lowest priorities in Louisiana, typically up on the chopping block when the state legislature is forced to choose among different programs. Louisiana has been at the bottom of many human development indices, and I am convinced that is linked to the lack of emphasis on education. So, for people in Louisiana who do not have faith or family upon which they can build their own future, unfortunately, they don't really have education to fall back on either.

Even so, if people do not have that foundation, through faith, family, whatever, and, for whatever reason, cannot or will not embrace education as a tool to better themselves, we still cannot turn our back on them. For better or worse, these are our own citizens. Letting them twist in the wind may be fine in some folks' minds, but nothing happens in isolation. As folks as far away as Houston and Atlanta are learning, along with hosts of communities in between, and especially beleagered Baton Rouge, what happens in one neighborhood will not stay there (except perhaps in Vegas!). Somehow we need to help these folks build a foundation that embraces education, embraces empowerment, creates a future.

I don't have any magical formula for this -- if I did, I would be a private consultant making beacoup bucks, talking with Oprah and Dr. Phil, and people would be buying my overpriced advice book. I do know that we cannot empower people with FEMA grants or handouts. If you speak with any development professional, they will tell you that self-help trumps grants or handouts any time, because grants and humanitarian aid, needed in those situations where survival is at stake, can be perverted into creating dependencies when used after survival is no longer the issue. It is unfortunate that the political climate in the U.S. is such that we can say this safely about people in developing countries, but any statement along those lines about our own citizens will be shouted down and ignored.

The other thing I learned is much simpler, but much more disturbing. The thread keeping society together is much thinner than we in the U.S. might like it to be. It does not take much for that thread to unravel and for humanity's baser, more primitive instincts to kick in. We saw it in L.A. after Rodney King. We saw it, and still see it in Louisiana post-Katrina. I would like to think that we, all of us -- those of us in government, its citizens, the works -- will have learned something from the tragedy of Katrina, and will work to ensure it never happens again. That's what I would like to think, but I am afraid that is just wishful thinking. I am unfortunately confident that we will see those baser, more primal aspects of humanity emerge again, in some situation where government fails at its primary function, to preserve the stability and security of its populace.

Whew.

Thanks for listening to my downer blog entry. I needed to get this out of my system. Future blogs should focus on Afghanistan (that is what you are reading for, after all, right?). Now that we are approaching spring (even while it snowed again today), I hope that the next set of blogs should be more interesting, less introspective. We'll see.

Those of you in Louisiana, enjoy the azaleas blooming. No matter what else happens, the flowers will bloom in spring. Same goes for all of you in DC -- enjoy the cherry blossoms! Everybody in the Northern Hemisphere, enjoy spring!