This morning I had a long phone chat with my Dallas sister, K. There are thousands of refugees from NOLA currently housed in Reunion Arena on the edge of downtown commercial and financial Dallas. My sister's car is loaded up with cases of bottled water and Pampers, which she was fixin' to take to one of the churches working with the folks at Reunion. This sister and I share common political views, so we spent a whole lot of my free cell minutes talking over this whole sad situation and, yes, its political ramifications. Of which there are many, but that's not my point right now.
Right now what I'm thinking about is how long this whole diaspora from NO and other places on the coast is likely to last. I think the off-the-cuff estimates being bandied about are much too optimistic. I don't think it will be six months before NO is a livable city again - I think it may easily be years. In the meantime, even if it's months, what are these people supposed to do? How long can you live in the middle of a sports arena, on cots, with small children and no income? Or all the other possibilities - old and ill, perhaps without any other family; grieving for the wife, mother, brother, baby, grandparent, you saw drown, die of heat exhaustion, heart/kidney/liver failure, gunshot wounds - of trauma and loss that these people have suffered? Where do you do your laundry? How many shower facilities are in a sports arena? How long do you have to wait in line for one? Think of all the normal daily routines and aspects of life they are now utterly without. How long before problems of crime, drug use, prostitution, etc., start to develop as a result of this displacement?
No because they are bad people - this is not judgment on the refugees - I'm reading so much head-shaking and tsk-tsking from right-wing writers about what happened in the city after the flood began, and it makes me pretty angry. Who wouldn't "loot" food, water, clothes, diapers, for their suffering family? What addict wouldn't "loot" cigarettes, booze, drugs, to feed a habit that helps them make it through the night under normal cirmumstances, let alone the circumstance of losing home, loved ones, everything that was their life, no matter how substandard in others' eyes? No one else was going to use/eat/drink/wear those things, and the retail merchants are putting in their insurance reimbursement claims as I type.
The people now housed in sports arenas, convention centers, church halls, jails (yes, jails - an old jail in Dallas is also being used as a holding center for refugees, and don't you know how good that feels?), can't live any normal kind of life in this holding-pen atmosphere for indefinite lengths of time - none of us could. However, most of us wouldn't have to. We have money market funds, savings accounts, vacation homes in other places (or family members/friends who have them and would offer them), RVs we would have driven out of danger and be able to live in, resources available to us on fairly short notice. No one would have been in that Superdome if they'd had any other choice. No one would be in Reunion Arena with any other choice to take. So, what's going to happen to these folks in the long run? That's what my sister and I were wondering.
I suppose we'll be hearing more plans for the long run as the short term gets more organized and the entire scope of the situation is clear. What my sister knows, and all of us need to realize, is that this is not going to be over when the TV cameras, reporters, White House entourages, leave. It's not going to be over yet when the next catastrophe happens - hurricane, bomb on a bus, chemical plant explosion, earthquake, Al Quaeda attack on a crowded city. We, as a people, as a "public," have very short attention spans. Things move at a fast pace. Today's news is tomorrow's birdcage liner. When the story leaves the front pages of the nation's newspapers, it will still be ongoing in the lives of the homeless evacuees.
And so, our contributions need to be ongoing. We need to budget a monthly amount to contribute to whatever relief agency we choose, and continue to send it until this immense number of people has been reabsorbed into the normal fabric of life, however long it takes, however impossible it seems. Babies will need Pampers every day. Women will need tampons, haircuts. Everyone will need soap, shampoo, facilities for personal hygiene. And, tell you what, I bet they'd like to watch a mindless TV show and drink a beer from time to time. Even if you can't house anyone, and you have a sports arena or a church hall full of evacuees near you - invite them over for dinner. Take them and their kids to Chucky Cheese. Have a barbeque in the backyard for several families. Take a mother and her baby to Target for a shopping spree.
The number of people, people I know, expressing surprise at the heart of poverty in our society are the surprise for me. If this wakes America up to the reality that the streets of one of our most beautiful cities, a city that is a mecca for tourists, can look exactly like the streets of Haiti (the poorest country in the Americas) after a hurricane, and if that awakening can bring about a change in how we set our government priorities, in how and for whom we vote, of where our moral and religious values need to change direction, then this disaster will have taught us a hard and terrible lesson. If we heed this lesson, we have the chance to become a far better country, one that cares about all of its citizens.
