Monday, November 14, 2005
Forgotten Already Ray is in New Orleans and the devastation has left him without words. Imagine. It is so bad a writer can't write about it, photos can't show it. We are a nation in love with forgetting. Given the opportunity to push what's ugly, what's difficult into the netherworld of distant memory, we do. It's curious, really, this infatuation with forgetfulness. Tonight I glanced a show about Katrina and Rita and Wilma on discovery channel or maybe travel, and the hurricanes were spoken of as history, as if the effects of these storms weren't still being felt across the gulf. Well they are. Hundreds of thousands are still homeless, are still without adequate shelter. Many are being evicted from apartments because FEMA's vouchers don't begin to cover rents in most American cities. Most of New Orleans is still uninhabitable. None of my friends have been able to return to their city though more than two months have passed. One friend, a poet from our workshop, lost nearly everything. She estimates 95% of her belongings melted away in the standing floodwaters that took over her Mid-City apartment for weeks and weeks. And this loss followed the horrific trip out of town, a journey punctuated by lack of drinking water, gas, and a sleepless night on the side of the road. In today's Times-Picayune, the editors wonder whether or not the nation has completely forgotten their city, and whether or not that includes Congress. Across the city, they say, are signs of nascient life, that even as the roads continue to be littered with unusable refrigerators, residents continue to filter back in to rebuild their lives: This
fragile but unmistakable resurgence of life makes Congress' growing
indifference to our area's fate all the more frustrating. The creeping
abandonment of greater New Orleans could be deadly for us. But it
should also appall many others -- Floridians who are almost as
vulnerable to hurricanes as we are, Californians who live in fear of
earthquakes, residents of the many cities that could fall victim to
terrorist attacks.
Ours is an uneasy place to be. Help is easy to come by when people are suffering on camera. But the needs exist long after those images recede, and it is a frightening prospect to fear being forgotten. Yes, when the cameras are on, when the images are flooding our living rooms and kitchens with helplessness and despair, we respond. We care. But as soon as those images are catalogued in the underground vaults of distant memory, we forget about the need. This isn't just about New Orleans, of course. While running at the gym tonight, I saw a 60 Minutes segment about a group of New York City doctors who went to Pakistan on their own to help victims of the earthquake. What they found were vast areas of the country that had not been visited by a single relief worker or government official. They worked in a forgotten valley, treating infections and lifethreatening disease, and since they are from New York, the news started to cover them and soon relief organizations came to the valley. When they did, the doctors packed up their mules (that's the only way to travel through the devastated borderlands) and headed to the next forgotten valley to treat more forgotten people. Perhaps it is because there is too much to worry about, too much flooding of information for us to deal with it all. Perhaps that is why we push it into the depths. We need to remember. We need to remind ourselves and our leadership. And we need to demand more from our government, because a handful of New Yorkers, a handful of North Carolinans or Chicagoans or Texans can't do it all. 
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Last update: 11/28/05; 5:34:13 PM .
