September 8, 2005
No Strangers to the Blues
By
BOB HERBERT
The tragedy in New Orleans did not occur in a vacuum. There is no way, even
in the face of a storm as violent as Katrina, that a great American city
should
have been reduced to little more than a sewage pit overnight.
The monumental failure of the federal government to respond immediately and
effectively to the catastrophe that resulted from Hurricane Katrina was
preceded
by many years in which the people of New Orleans (especially its poorest
residents) were shamefully neglected by all levels of government.
New Orleans was not a disaster waiting to happen when the screaming winds of
Katrina slammed the city with the force of an enemy attack. The disaster was
already under way long before Katrina ever existed. The flood that followed
the storm, and the Bush administration's ineptitude following the flood,
were
the blows that sent an already weakened city down for the count.
The public school system, for example, is one of the worst in the nation.
Forget about educating the children, 96 percent of them black. School
officials,
enveloped in a bureaucratic fog and the toxic smoke of corruption, do not
even know how many people are employed by the system. The budget is a joke.
Money
had to be borrowed to pay teachers.
The classroom environment has been chaotic. About 10,000 of the 60,000
students were suspended last year, and nearly 1,000 were expelled. Half of
the high
school kids fail to graduate in four years. To get a sense of the system's
priorities, consider the following from a Times-Picayune editorial last
fall:
"When it was still unclear which way Hurricane Ivan would go, school system
employees on school system time driving school system vehicles using school
system materials were sent to board up the superintendent's house."
That superintendent left (and not a moment too soon), but the abject neglect
of the young remained. Long before the hurricane, the children of New
Orleans
had been failed by the adults responsible for them, starting in many cases
with their parents and going right on up through their teachers, city
officials,
state officials and a national administration that sees the kids mostly as
objects - totems - to be hugged during campaign photo-ops.
Crime in New Orleans is another issue that has gotten a lot of attention in
Katrina's aftermath. It should have gotten more attention before the
hurricane
hit. A great deal of the mayhem reported or rumored to have occurred over
the past several days appears to have been exaggerated. But New Orleans has
long
had a serious crime problem. And it has never been properly dealt with.
A couple of days ago I was talking with a woman named Julia Cass who had
fled the flood and settled temporarily in Montgomery, Ala. It turns out that
Ms.
Cass, a former reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, had just completed a
paper for the Children's Defense Fund, which is concerned about the effect
on children of the chronic violence plaguing New Orleans.
Ms. Cass noted that as of Aug. 19, there had been 192 murders in the city,
an increase of 7 percent over that period last year. (You can get a decent
perspective
on the violence if you note that New Orleans, with a population of 500,000,
had 264 homicides last year, compared with the 572 homicides in New York,
which
has a population of 8 million.)
Ms. Cass wrote that in homicide cases in New Orleans, witnesses frequently
refuse to come forward, or do not show up at trials. "The general
explanation
is that they are afraid," she said, "and with good reason, since the
perpetrators too often are not arrested or get out on bail or are never
prosecuted
or are not convicted. A person who murders another in New Orleans has less
than a one in four chance of being convicted."
New Orleans has had high rates of illiteracy and high rates of poverty, and
long before the hurricane blew in, high rates of children and families with
extraordinarily low expectations. In short, much of the city was a mess, and
no one was marshaling the considerable resources necessary to help pull its
stricken residents out of the trouble of their daily lives.
Those were the residents who, for the most part, were left behind to suffer
and die when the people of means began sprinting toward higher ground. They
are the ones who are always left behind, out of sight and out of mind, and
I'd be surprised - given the history of this country - if that were to
change
now.
E-mail: bobherb@nytimes.com
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