#the looting myth btw is a capitalist abomination

[marnz]

we recently watched Five Days At Memorial, a drama about a doctor at memorial hospital murdering disabled people (””euthanasia””) during Hurricane Katrina. It was absolutely harrowing and horrific on every single level. Prior to this show I didn’t know the intricacies of what happened during and after the Hurricane Katrina--I was a young person on the other side of the country when it happened and the level of clusterfuck was such that it was years before we had a full grasp on what had happened and how bad every level of government response was.

But I feel that eventually, as a person, it’s on you to learn about stuff you don’t know anything about! The alternative is to just stay ignorant forever, which, nope. So I’ve been trying to read about it, and there is literally so much it’s been overwhelming. In my research I came across This Article on the Looting Myth, which I am linking here for archiving purposes. It disturbs me that it was the ‘looting’ I heard about as a kid, instead of how many levees failed, or FEMA being incompetent and led by a white man who lied on his resume, or GWB literally flying over New Orleans but not stopping to offer aid, or the racism that contributed to all of this, or the poverty that meant so many people could not evacuate, or that the levees breaking was the fault of the US Army Corps of Engineers but due to sovereign immunity they can’t be sued or really held responsible in a material way...

and I understand, a little bit more, why Five Days At Memorial was such a powerful story: there were horrific choices made and a lot of suffering and no consequences, which is just a microcosm of Hurricane Katrina itself. Dr. Pou, the murdering doctor, got away with it and is still practicing to this day.

anyway. more and more the early aughts feel like a time capsule because everything was so profoundly different and change has occurred in such a short period of time that it’s difficult to find the language to communicate just how different stuff was. it’s not the change, it’s the rate of change. it’s humbling. how so many things an entire generation takes for granted were started and normalized in that period. but then you see that a lot of things haven’t changed. the levees in New Orleans were conceived of and ground was broken in 1965. the project was estimated to take 13 years. hurricane katrina was forty years later and they still weren’t fully done, which just reminds me of the 1989 agreement to clean up hanford and properly store nuclear waste generated by the manhattan project, which is hideously behind schedule and facing budget cuts! federal incompetency and the lack of consequences of it continues.