As a native of New Orleans, I was appalled by Neil St. Clair’s column about parents who lost children during Hurricane Katrina (“Calling out Katrina’s accomplices,” Oct. 9, p. 7). St. Clair’s entire argument was unfounded and ridiculous.
First, comparing a child’s death caused by natural disaster to one caused by abandonment is unsubstantiated as the two events are completely unrelated. St. Clair might as well have stated that a parent should be prosecuted if his child dies due to any choice made by the parents. In that case, if a child living in California dies in an earthquake, his parents should be prosecuted. Better yet, if a child is killed due to gang violence in a ghetto, his parents should be prosecuted for not maintaining a high enough social status to move their child out of a dangerous environment. Following St. Clair’s logic, all the parents living in California or in a ghetto do not “meet the burden placed upon them by law, society and the rules of human decency.”
Second, St. Clair discredits the major reason behind why people stayed for the hurricane. There was, in fact, a mandatory evacuation; however, it was instated 18 hours before the storm landed, which is not more than 24 hours, as St. Clair would have you believe. Before the mandatory evacuation, there was a voluntary evacuation in effect. For a region that deals with six or seven hurricanes every year, there is a different mentality for voluntary evacuations -that you do not evacuate for every single hurricane. My own grandparents did not want to leave for Katrina, because, hey, they stayed and survived Hurricane Betsy of 1965, which was the same strength storm and had the same devastating effects as Katrina.
The majority of the people who stayed in New Orleans were residents of the Lower Ninth Ward, an area where one of the levees broke. For those who do not know, the Lower Ninth Ward is one of the poorest regions in New Orleans. The majority of residents did not have the means to leave and there were not enough buses or National Guard assistance to evacuate everyone. Seeing as this was the first citywide mandatory evacuation, it should not have been expected that everyone would evacuate. And a lot of the people who did stay did “walk as far as was necessary” to an evacuation center – the Superdome. Perhaps St. Clair did not watch the news, but maybe he heard about the conditions of the Superdome, which was a cause of many deaths. These conditions cannot be blamed on the parents, but on the lack of government aid.
Enough of playing the blame game; you can blame the government, you can even blame the people living in poverty for not being able to evacuate, but to blame the parents who lost children, even to blame someone for dying, is completely arrogant in itself. Isn’t it enough that the parents lost their children and have to live with that for the rest of their lives?
Vicki Hall
CAS ’10
