I like John Farmer; he’s making lots of sense to me, on this and some other issues. I don’t know about you, but for me his assessment of our posh living style, our ubiquitous head in the sand, is right on target.
Imagine there’s no city
But emergency planners have known for years how vulnerable New Orleans would be to a major storm. When I attended a seminar for FEMA emergency planning certification a few years ago, one of the two hypotheticals we studied was whether New Orleans, a city below sea level, could withstand a Category 4 hurricane. What happened this week may have been the worst-case scenario, but it was also right out of the textbook. The catastrophe predicted in our exercise came true this week. (The other, by the way, was a Category 3 hurricane hitting Lower Manhattan.)
Why, given our experts’ clear knowledge of the Gulf Coast’s vulnerability, were we so unprepared for the scale of this week’s tragedy? The answer is simple: We live in the age of sweetness, light and horror.
We are anaesthetized by our prosperity. We sit addled in our suburban indifference until, every once in a while, our world is shattered by some horrific disaster. The Twin Towers fall. A tsunami kills over 250,000 people. A hurricane murders a city.
We have a few bad weeks. Then we get over it. Back to sweetness and light. Horror’s back on hold.
Our politicians are mortally afraid of disturbing our comfort for any reason. So they have refused, in the name of not disrupting our economy, to urge us to change at all the way we live after 9/11. To do so, they say — to devote greater resources to preparing for disaster, and thus to impinge potentially on our prosperity — would be a victory for the terrorists.
The absurdity of this logic was revealed by Katrina. By this reasoning, if members of Congress had appropriated the money to reinforce the levees, to ensure a more rapid evacuation strategy and National Guard deployment and overall emergency response, they would have been handing Providence a victory it hadn’t earned. Right.
