Harpers: The Uses of Disaster by Rebecca Solnit
This piece went to press as Hurricane Katrina hit, but the online version includes a postscript on New Orleans.
“Many official disaster-preparedness scenarios…presume that human beings are prone to panic and in need of policing … In 1906, for example, no one quite declared martial law, but soldiers, policemen, and some armed college students patrolled the streets of San Francisco looking for looters, with orders to shoot on sight. Even taking food from buildings about to burn down was treated as a crime: property and order were prized above survival or even reason. But ‘the authorities’ are too few and too centralized to respond to the dispersed and numerous emergencies of a disaster. Instead, the people classified as victims generally do what can be done to save themselves and one another. In doing so, they discover not only the potential power of civil society but also the fragility of existing structures of authority…
The events of September 11, 2001, though entirely unnatural, shed light on the nature of all disasters. That day saw the near-total failure of centralized authority. The United States has the largest and most technologically advanced military in the world, but the only successful effort to stop the commandeered planes from becoming bombs was staged by the unarmed passengers inside United Airlines Flight 93…The police and fire departments responded valiantly to the bombings of the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, but most of the people there who survived did so because they rescued themselves and one another…
The aftermath of disaster is often peculiarly hopeful, and in the rupture of the ordinary, real change often emerges. But this means that disaster threatens not only bodies, buildings, and property but also the status quo. Disaster recovery is not just a rescue of the needy but also a scramble for power and legitimacy, one that the status quo usually-but not always-wins.”
And from the postscript:
“At stake in stories of disaster is what version of human nature we will accept, and at stake in that choice is how will we govern, and how we will cope with future disasters. By now, more than a week after New Orleans has been destroyed, we have heard the stories of poor, mostly black people who were ‘out of control.’ We were told of ‘riots’ and babies being murdered, of instances of cannibalism. And we were provided an image of authority, of control-of power as a necessary counter not to threats to human life but to unauthorized shopping, as though free TVs were the core of the crisis. ‘This place is going to look like Little Somalia,’ Brigadier General Gary Jones, commander of the Louisiana National Guard’s Joint Task Force told the Army Times. ‘We’re going to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under control’…
Disasters are almost by definition about the failure of authority, in part because the powers that be are supposed to protect us from them, in part also because the thousand dispersed needs of a disaster overwhelm even the best governments, and because the government version of governing often arrives at the point of a gun. But the authorities don’t usually fail so spectacularly. Failure at this level requires sustained effort. The deepening of the divide between the haves and have nots, the stripping away of social services, the defunding of the infrastructure, mean that this disaster-not of weather but of policy-has been more or less what was intended to happen, if not so starkly in plain sight…
The Convention Center and the Superdome became open prisons. ‘They won’t let them walk out,’ reported Fox News anchor Shepard Smith, in a radical departure from the script. ‘They got locked in there. And anyone who walks up out of that city now is turned around. You are not allowed to go to Gretna, Louisiana, from New Orleans, Louisiana. Over there, there’s hope. Over there, there’s electricity. Over there, there is food and water. But you cannot go from here to there. The government will not allow you to do it. It’s a fact’…
That was not anarchy, nor was it civil society.”
Thanks Peter.