A Lesson from Katrina- revisited

John Howard has referred to Hurricane Katrina in his attempts to sell his invasion and annexation of Aboriginal Lands in the NT. Readers might be interested in my take on Katrina first published in an early, email edition of The Tank

A Lesson from Katrina
The disaster that is currently playing out in New Orleans and the other Gulf towns of the USA did not start with the first furious winds of Hurricane Katrina. It has its roots in the fact that America and Americans seem to have never really come to grips with the basic concepts of their own Constitution.
When America freed the slaves, following the American Civil War, it failed to free its minds and embrace the elemental truth that it is unacceptable in any society that calls itself civilised to allow a large underclass of its citizens to live an impoverished, marginalised and hopeless existence.
This group of mostly Afro-Americans, the descendants of former slaves, is kept in check with miserly welfare handouts, the constant threat of imprisonment and the ready availability of drugs.
But release the pressure for a moment and all the resentment that has been bottled up for generations surfaces.
I don’t condone for a moment the actions of a small element of those trapped in the Superdome and elsewhere. But at the same time they are victims of the system that Americans have allowed to perpetuate. It’s a system based on maintaining a wide disparity between haves and have-nots and the illusion that all can eat their fill of crumbs from an endless cake at the rich man’s table The fact is that most of the working poor will be forced to work for low wages in menial jobs or sign up as cannon fodder to fight in wars waged to shore up the economic interests of wealthy individuals and corporations.
Faced with the grinding poverty and mindless existence that is the lot of so many citizens of the richest country of Earth, the victims of the system are forced to adopt a sceptical, even paranoid, stance to any effort by authorities to ease their burden.
U.S. society, despite the freedoms espoused in its Constitution and by its President, is fundamentally still rooted in the notion that the few are at liberty to prey on the many. If in the process the poor can scavenge enough of the crumbs of the rich man’s table, a façade of seemingly natural order is maintained.
But this order is an illusion. Any disturbance out of the ordinary; the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King or the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina, will see the lid lifted on the cauldron that has been boiling secretly for decades.
Whether those in power consciously understand the system they oversee, or wield their power instinctively, I really don’t know but it’s at times like these that the opportunity arises to enter a dialogue about how the inherent deficiencies of the system can be fixed to create a truly free and equal society.
The lesson for us here in Australia is obvious. We proceed down the greed is good, might is right, haves and have-nots path at our peril.
Perhaps this is a good time for all of us to ask the question, “What is a society and what is my role in it.”
If the answer is that we Homo sapiens have come together for reasons of mutual advantage such as defence, health care, education of our children etc then a fairer, more compassionate system than the US model is obviously needed.
If we have aggregated so that the strong can prey on the weak, the rich on the poor, the powerful on the marginalised, then the system we have seen exposed in New Orleans should suit us just fine.