Will Hurricane Katrina turn out to be a blessing in disguise?
Since the end of the Civil War, Louisiana and Mississippi have consistently ranked amongst the most impoverished states in the Union. Almost one in five of their residents live below the officially defined poverty line. One third fail to complete high school, and almost two thirds lack the minimum literacy standards considered necessary to function in society. Prisons are overflowing, unemployment and teenage pregnancy are norms in many areas, and much of the housing stock is so antiquated and decrepit that, if it wasn't for the ubiquitous pick up trucks and fast food joints, you would think you had been timewarped back into the Reconstruction era.
Poor though these states are, I doubt any state would be able to cope adequately in the immediate aftermath of a disaster like Katrina: when hospitals and shelters are underwater, roads and bridges are shattered, all electricity and communications are wiped out; nor do I think that any other states would have been able to prevent such a catastrophe occurring in the first place: there is only so much concrete it is viable to pour at an extreme and hypothetical risk.
But the scenes and stories from New Orleans and Biloxi are remarkable - compared to, for example, the smaller scale but equally personally devastating hurricane damage we have seen so often before in Florida and the Carolinas - because they spotlight the region's economic and psychological inability to cope with rebounding from disaster. In Florida, widescale looting and rape doesn't happen after a hurricane. Armed gangs don't roam the streets. Families made homeless by hurricanes in Florida have a good cry, then file an insurance claim and start rebuilding. But what incentives do the poor, uninsured and desperate residents of Louisiana have to rebuild their hopeless lives in a calm and orderly fashion?
It's difficult to allocate blame for the miserable state of this region and its people. The streets of New Orleans were notoriously lawless even back when the city was under French and Spanish control, before the United States bought Louisiana in 1804. The failure of federal Reconstruction in the Deep South following the Civil War condemned the black majority to decades of disenfranchisement and poverty: and even now, the fiercely guarded doctrine of states rights means that federal government has limited remit to poke their noses into the way the Governors and legislatures of Mississippi and Louisiana run their affairs. Federally-initiated programs such as No Child Left Behind are well-intended, but their success nevertheless largely depends on the competence and will of the local people responsible for executing these programs. And given that endemic fraudulence and corruption on the part of politicians and officials in these states has been modus operandi for much of the last 150 years, it's no wonder the federal goverment has historically been reluctant to hand over huge blank checks for these states to spend entirely as they please.
I'd prefer not to waste time trying to allocate blame for the disgraceful poverty and economic stagnation of Louisiana and Mississippi, but focus on what opportunities may arise from the disaster. If the Mayor of New Orleans has broken down and begged for large scale federal intervention to resuscitate his city, maybe that's no bad thing. If the long term reconstruction of roads, schools and factories creates thousands of jobs and provides a much needed boost to the local economy, then that could be a great thing. And if thousands of decaying swamp-edge wooden hovels with no air conditioning and inadequate sanitation have been washed away by Katrina, their former residents might even be relieved.
As one black woman from Louisiana, who had been evacuated to Texas with her husband after losing their home and all their meagre possessions, said on Radio 4 over the weekend: "My outlook on life has got so much better in the last couple of days since we arrived here. I hated our life where we were: this is a chance for a fresh start."
