Change will come gradually to Gulf Coast

On the second to last day of my service-learning trip to the Gulf Coast, I stood in a circle with my fellow volunteers and waited my turn as we went round and shared our final reflections. I stood there and tried to find something meaningful to say about all the work that still needed to be done, even five years after Hurricane Katrina. About little Boothville in Southern Louisiana, a town that made Poughkeepsie look like a gleaming metropolis, and that had, thanks to Hurricane Katrina, spent several weeks literally underwater. About the young family whom we'd helped a bit towards creating a viable living space out of a broken and beaten old trailer. About all the empty lots in Boothville to which families might want to return, though they lacked the means to do so, and about the rows of deserted homes in New Orleans with writing on their walls—writing that had been telling the same story since the first volunteers set it down—what it was that they'd found inside in the initial aftermath of the storm.

Throughout the course of the trip, it was hard not to cast blame around, and surely, there is a lot of blame to be cast. The Army Corps of Engineers said Boothville's levies were high enough. They were not. New Orleans wasn't even directly hit by the storm, yet their levies broke. But it was not the whole city that was affected—the poorer, predominantly black regions suffered the most, whereas the more affluent parts of the city, set on higher ground, came away relatively unscathed. In Boothville, we learned that hurricanes had devastated the region twice before, by Hurricane Betsy in 1965 and Hurricane Camille in 1969. After the destruction Hurricane Camille wrought, the government at least provided all homeless residents with trailers as temporary housing. After Hurricane Katrina, there was no such response.

One of the things I found myself struggling with was whether the lack of government assistance should surprise me. Would I expect the government to step in on my behalf if I didn't have insurance, or if my insurance company found a way to cheat me out of my just compensation, as allegedly happened to a number of Boothville residents? The answer is no. Not because I think it's right or wrong, but because that's just not how our political-economic system is designed to work. Granted, the destruction resulting from Hurricane Katrina was on a much grander scale, but the effect, at the individual level, is similar. My point here is that it seems we're surprised when a political-economic system not equipped to provide these kinds of safety nets to individuals suffering everyday disasters fails to adequately address a disaster of Hurricane Katrina's scale. The only reason for this I could find is that large scale disasters have a shock and awe factor that puts them at the fore of peoples' minds, wherever they happen to be in the country. That, it seems, is the only difference.

While it is easy to become fixated on Hurricane Katrina, if we feel there is injustice in the government response to the storm, our problem is actually less with the governmental response and more with the political-economic system that, when put under stress, responded inadequately to people in need. There are many reasons for why our system is flawed, but the deepest, simplest reason for why our system is imperfect—a reason we can all agree on—is that imperfect, fallible beings can only create imperfect and fallible systems, and implement them in imperfect, fallible ways. Upon realizing this, it is easy to become very angry, very frustrated at the immensity of the problems facing us, at the seeming hopelessness of change. We are faced with problems within problems within problems; the steps we must take to address them are steps within steps within steps. Progress feels a far off, almost impossible, dream, hard to hold onto in the bitter reality of a moment-by-moment existence.

When it came to be my turn to speak, I tried my best to put all the frustration we'd been feeling in context. Our efforts in the Gulf Coast and our lives before and after our trip all figure into the societal evolution of the human race. We often forget this in a world that at times seems harsh and cruel, but the guns, both metaphorical and literal fire, the bombs fall and shrapnel shrieks through the air, not because most people in this world are bad, but because most people in this world are good but also flawed and fallible. Even though I consider myself something of a cynic, regaining some measure of faith in humanity can be as simple as recalling a conversation with a friend. And even a semi-reclusive, non-partying, introvert such as myself has his friends, and is a friend to some.

We should not expect change to come easily. We should not expect change to come quickly. And we should not expect to ever reach our goal. And this is good. This is good, because change, evolution, should be a struggle. It should be painful and arduous and heartbreaking because we are struggling against our own fallibility, imperfection. And what gives us the heart to struggle against our very natures should not be the mirage of a far off future that we will die before reaching, but rather, the people who work side-by-side with us to make this societal evolution happen, one little step a time—through acts of charity, issues education and community organizing, sure, but also through something as seemingly insignificant as sharing a laugh with a friend.