Flood This Time, Fire Next

Four years later, the images return in all their ferocity and all their pain: pieces of a proud city sinking before our eyes. Endless streams of people turned into evacueessome turned into heroesin their own country. The pictures of the missing and those who held them.

That was my city four years ago. In the days that followed, we all carried each other out of the abyss. We rebuilt lower Manhattan, and we vowed as a nation that we would never again let a calamity of such magnitude catch us unprepared.

Yet over two more wrenching weeks in September, weve watched those very images repeat themselves in New Orleans and Mississippi, and we cant help but wonder if that promise of never again was made to be broken by our government.

Hurricane Katrina itself, of course, was a product of natural violence, not human violence, and we need to be careful with any comparisons with September 11 lest they trivialize the suffering of either one. But we also need to be honest with ourselves: if 9/11 was a wake-up call we all felt compelled to answer, 8/30 was a living nightmare which much of this nation slept through.

Soundest of all slept the federal government, as the president strummed a guitar in California, and took until yesterday to admit any degree of responsibility for its failures. Those days of lethal inaction beg the question: have we not learned anything since that lucid September morning?

As we finally wake up this time and come to the aid of all the people left behind or cast out, we have to ask ourselves not only what this government failed to do, but what it would fail to do again if given the chance.

You cant pre-empt a hurricane, but you can pre-empt the worst of its devastation if you see these things comingas the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) did with New Orleans way back in 2001.

Yet you cant do that, either, if youre not directing resources towards the communities confronting the greatest threat, and instead youre directing them away towards pork, tax cuts, and occupations of choice foreign countries.

You cant do that if youre turning your back on the millions of Americans living in desperate poverty, including one third of New Orleanians and all those who couldnt afford a ride out of there.

You cant do that if youre forcing the stoppage of work on levee repair, and cutting federal flood control spending in half for Louisiana over the last four years.

With a terror attack, its a little different. Complete pre-emption is actually possibleif youve got effective human intelligence, cooperation with immigrant communities and with other nations, and allocation of necessary resources to road, rail, port and airport security.

But youre less likely to pre-empt anything when youre keeping those resources bottled up in Washington, when youre shutting firehouses in New York so you can open oil refineries in Iraq, and when your best answer to poor intelligence is to torture prisoners at random, deport potentially valuable sources, and withdraw from the community of nations.

When pre-emption becomes impossible, the least you can do is supply people with the means of escape and survival. Thats what our courageous first responders did for countless New Yorkers on September 11, and what so many ordinary people have done throughout the floods. We may never know how many were saved by their heroic spirit of mutual aid.

But their rescue owed no thanks to a government which, until recently, took pride in its red alerts, its rapid air-strikes, its false sense of security. Are we left with any reason to share that sense of security, and to look forward to a more serious response to the fire next time?

Will we allow one foreseeable catastrophe after another to cut down our proudest cities, one by one? For now, the good old boys at FEMA and Homeland Security can cross New York and New Orleans off the top of their list of likely disasters. Whats next?

This is a time for vigilance and a time for reckoningnot just with the continuing threats of hurricanes and hijackers, but with a government that has only one thing to say to them: Bring it on.

We cant go back to sleep this time around.

Michael Gould-Wartofsky 07, a Crimson editorial editor, is a government concentrator in Kirkland House.