Scoping a Disaster

YESTERDAY was the one year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's landfall. The media commemorated the anniversary with stories that tried to parse out how much progress has been made thus far, whether there should have been more or less, and (depending on where you stand on that issue) who deserves the blame or praise. There was also a lot of commentary asking why the devastation on the Gulf Coast hasn't been bigger news over the course of the past year.

I've wondered about that as well, especially as we approach the five year anniversary of 9/11, which has been commemorated with two major motion pictures and countless TV specials. A lot of folks are quick to jump on the media (as if the media were a single person), and I do think that the fact that 9/11 took place in the nation's media hub is certainly pertinent.

I wonder, however, whether the disparity isn't primarily a result of the vastly different scopes of the two disasters. 9/11 happened fast, while we all watched, and although the motivations of someone who would murder for political purposes are hard to parse and fathom, 9/11 happened on a human scale. It was a human act, and if for that reason only, somehow more comprehensible. Katrina, on the other hand, was a series of catastrophes and failures in the face of an impersonal force of nature that took place over days.

I lived in New York City the summer after 9/11, down in the Financial District. When friends would come to visit, we would walk over to Ground Zero, through the vendors already selling memorabilia, and stare through the chainlink fence at the massive hole in the ground where the towers used to stand. The memories were fresh, but in a way they were contained and processed on the tip of Manhattan.

Katrina washed away tens of thousands of homes, wiping out entire neighborhoods and ripping apart communities. Everyone who comes back from New Orleans talks about the incomprehensible destruction. Where do you contain something like Katrina?

Ultimately, everything failed in New Orleans, the entire social fabric; in New York, the horror of that day was cut through with stories of hope and faith.

Maybe less has been said about Katrina because we just don't know what to say, because it's too big, too hard to understand. And maybe, on some level, we know that despite our very best efforts, disasters like Katrina are ultimately beyond our control, and that too is too difficult to accept.