Americans are tired of thinking about Katrina.
Kate Browne
Issue date: 8/29/07 Section: Opinion
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We are tuned out or fed up - tired of staggering ineptitude and corruption at every level of government, tired of the money that leaves our treasury and appears to land in a bottomless sinkhole, tired of the crime and violence in New Orleans.
Two years after the storm, there is so much trouble with all things Katrina, the topic has become an abstract tangle of environmental, structural, economic, political and human issues we don't know how to fix. The problem feels so foreign, so "other."
The "otherness" of New Orleans contributes to our sense of distance from Katrina survivors. We don't quite empathize with people bound to a Creole place where African, Latin and Native American influences show up in racial flexibility and gumbo filé.
Here is a place where street parades celebrate the dead, voodoo is practiced, jazz was invented, families stay rooted and vice operates in the open. As long as the good times rolled, we consumed it as outsiders.
Katrina took away the fun that connected us to this amazingly complex and exuberant city.
Another factor shapes our weariness with Katrina. We are a society that believes in triumph over mighty odds, and there is no such ending on the horizon for New Orleans or for a great many of its residents.
Our fetish for happy endings is not trivial. It is, in fact, tied to a distinctive American morality that rises from ideas about self-reliance and the work ethic and the power these traits carry to help us prevail over the most challenging circumstances.
Many of us are also tired of thinking about Katrina because we believe that we have done everything we can - sent donations, volunteers and federal dollars to the survivors, to help rebuild levees, homes and infrastructure.
For all these reasons, we distance ourselves.
As a white, female professor and anthropologist, I see the disconnection between the grueling realities of post-Katrina life and the facile perceptions of this life among outsiders. If we don't feel connected, we don't have to care. But there is reason to care deeply.
Two years after the storm, there is so much trouble with all things Katrina, the topic has become an abstract tangle of environmental, structural, economic, political and human issues we don't know how to fix. The problem feels so foreign, so "other."
The "otherness" of New Orleans contributes to our sense of distance from Katrina survivors. We don't quite empathize with people bound to a Creole place where African, Latin and Native American influences show up in racial flexibility and gumbo filé.
Here is a place where street parades celebrate the dead, voodoo is practiced, jazz was invented, families stay rooted and vice operates in the open. As long as the good times rolled, we consumed it as outsiders.
Katrina took away the fun that connected us to this amazingly complex and exuberant city.
Another factor shapes our weariness with Katrina. We are a society that believes in triumph over mighty odds, and there is no such ending on the horizon for New Orleans or for a great many of its residents.
Our fetish for happy endings is not trivial. It is, in fact, tied to a distinctive American morality that rises from ideas about self-reliance and the work ethic and the power these traits carry to help us prevail over the most challenging circumstances.
Many of us are also tired of thinking about Katrina because we believe that we have done everything we can - sent donations, volunteers and federal dollars to the survivors, to help rebuild levees, homes and infrastructure.
For all these reasons, we distance ourselves.
As a white, female professor and anthropologist, I see the disconnection between the grueling realities of post-Katrina life and the facile perceptions of this life among outsiders. If we don't feel connected, we don't have to care. But there is reason to care deeply.
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