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# 2025-02-21 - A Paradise Built In Hell by Rebecca Solnit | |
Years ago a friend recommended this book, and i finally got around to | |
checking it out from the local library. I enjoyed reading it and | |
learned a few things, including the terms "elite panic" and | |
"social capitol". I was also deeply affected by reading the story of | |
Donnell Herrington, and i am glad that SOMEBODY told it. | |
Below are interesting excerpts from the book | |
# Intro | |
Thousands of people survived Hurricane Katrina because grandsons or | |
aunts or neighbors or complete strangers reached out to those in need | |
all through the Gulf Coast and because an armada of boat owners from | |
the surrounding communities and as far away as Texas went into New | |
Orleans to pull stranded people to safety. Hundreds of people died | |
in the aftermath of Katrina because others, including police, | |
vigilantes, high government officials, and the media, decided that | |
the people of New Orleans were too dangerous to allow them to | |
evacuate the septic, drowned city or to rescue them, even from | |
hospitals. Some who attempted to flee were turned back at gunpoint | |
or shot down. Rumors proliferated about mass rapes, mass murders, | |
and mayhem that turned out later to be untrue, though the national | |
media and New Orleans's police chief believed and perpetuated those | |
rumors during the crucial days when people were dying on rooftops and | |
elevated highways and in crowded shelters and hospitals in the | |
unbearable heat, without adequate water, without food, without | |
medicine and medical attention. Those rumors led soldiers and others | |
dispatched as rescuers to regard victims as enemies. | |
Katrina was an extreme version of what goes on in many disasters, | |
wherein how you behave depends on whether you think your neighbors or | |
fellow citizens are a greater threat than the havoc wrought by a | |
disaster or a greater good than the property in houses and stores | |
around you. What you believe shapes how you act. How you act | |
results in life or death, for yourself or others. | |
In the wake of an earthquake, a bombing, or a major storm, most | |
people are altruistic, urgently engaged in caring for themselves and | |
those around them, strangers and neighbors as well as friends and | |
loved ones. The image of the selfish, panicky, or regressively | |
savage human being in times of disaster has little truth to it. | |
Decades of meticulous sociological research on behavior in disasters, | |
from the bombings of World War II to floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, | |
and storms across the continent and around the world, have | |
demonstrated this. But belief lags behind, and often the worst | |
behavior in the wake of a calamity is on the part of those who | |
believe that other will behave savagely and that they themselves are | |
taking defensive measures against barbarism. From | |
earthquake-shattered San Francisco in 1906 to flooded New Orleans in | |
2005, innocents have been killed by people who believed or asserted | |
that their victims were the criminals and they themselves were the | |
protectors of the shaken order. Beliefs matter. | |
I was more surprised to realize that most of the people I knew and | |
met in the Bay Area were also enjoying immensely the disaster that | |
shut down much of the region for several days, the Bay Bridge for | |
months, and certain unloved elevated freeways forever [in 1989]--if | |
*enjoyment* is the right word for that sense of immersion in the | |
moment and solidarity with others caused by the rupture in everyday | |
life, an emotion graver than happiness but deeply positive. We don't | |
even have a language for this emotion, in which the wonderful comes | |
wrapped in the terrible, joy in sorrow, courage in fear. We cannot | |
welcome disaster, but we can value the responses, both practical and | |
psychological. | |
What is this feeling that crops up during so many disasters? This | |
book is about that emotion, as important as it is surprising, and the | |
circumstances that arouse it and those that it generates. These | |
things count as we enter an era of increasing and intensifying | |
disaster. | |
The positive emotions that arise in those unpromising circumstances | |
demonstrate that social ties and meaningful work are deeply desired, | |
readily improvised, and intensely rewarding. The very structure of | |
our economy and society prevents these goals from being achieved. | |
The structure is also ideological, a philosophy that best serves the | |
wealthy and powerful but shapes all of our lives, reinforced as the | |
conventional wisdom disseminated by the media, from news hours to | |
disaster movies. ... These accounts demonstrate that the citizens any | |
paradise would need--the people who are brave enough, resourceful | |
enough, and generous enough--already exist. The possibility of | |
paradise hovers on the cusp of coming into being, so much so that it | |
takes powerful forces to keep such a paradise at bay. If paradise | |
now arises in hell, it's because in the suspension of the usual order | |
and the failure of most systems, we are free to live and act in | |
another way. | |
Disaster movies and the media continue to portray ordinary people as | |
hysterical or vicious in the face of calamity. We believe these | |
sources telling us we are victims or brutes more than we trust our | |
own experience. Most people know this other [contrary to mass media] | |
human nature from experience, though almost nothing official or | |
mainstream confirms it. This book is an account of that rising from | |
the ruins that is the ordinary human response to disaster... | |
But to understand both that rising and what hinders and hides it, | |
there are two other important subjects to consider. One is the | |
behavior of the minority in power, who often act savagely in a | |
disaster. The other is the beliefs and representations of the media, | |
the people who hold up a distorting mirror to us in which it is | |
almost impossible to recognize these paradises and our | |
possibilities. Beliefs matter, and the overlapping beliefs of the | |
media and the elites can become a second wave of disaster--as they | |
did most dramatically in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. These | |
three subjects are woven together in almost every disaster, and | |
finding the one that matters most--this glimpse of paradise--means | |
understanding the forces that obscure, oppose, and sometimes rub out | |
that possibility. | |
In some of the disasters of the twentieth century--the big | |
northeastern blackouts in 1965 and 2003, the 1989 Loma Prieta | |
earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area, 2005's Hurricane Katrina on | |
the Gulf Coast--the loss of electrical power meant that the light | |
pollution blotting out the night sky vanished. In these | |
disaster-struck cities, people suddenly found themselves under the | |
canopy of stars still visible in small and remote places. On the | |
warn night of August 15, 2003, the Milky Way could be seen in New | |
York City, a heavenly realm long lost to view until the blackout that | |
hit the Northeast late that afternoon. You can think of the current | |
social order as something akin to this artificial light: another kind | |
of power that fails in disaster. In its place appears a reversion to | |
improvised, collaborative, cooperative, and local society. However | |
beautiful the stars of a suddenly visible night sky, few nowadays | |
could find their way by them. But the constellations of solidarity, | |
altruism, and improvisation are within most of us and reappear at | |
these times. ... This is the paradise entered through hell. | |
# Dorothy Day's Other Loves | |
Conventional therapy, necessary and valuable at times to resolve | |
personal crises and suffering, presents a very incomplete sense of | |
self. As a guide to the range of human possibility it is grimly | |
reductive. It will help you deal with your private shames and pains, | |
but it won't generally have much to say about your society and your | |
purpose on earth. It won't even suggest, most of the time, that you | |
provide yourself with relief from and perspective on the purely | |
personal by living in the larger world. Nor will it ordinarily | |
diagnose people as suffering from social alienation, meaninglessness, | |
or other anomies that arise from something other than familial and | |
erotic life. It more often leads to personal adjustment than social | |
change (during the 1950s, for example, psychology went to work | |
bullying women into accepting their status as housewives, the | |
language of Freudianism was deployed to condemn their desires for | |
more power, more independence, more dignity, and more of a role in | |
public life.) Such a confinement of desire and possibility to the | |
private serves the status quo as well: it describes no role for | |
citizenship and no need for social change or engagement. | |
Popular culture feeds on this privatized sense of self. A recent | |
movie about political activists proposed that they opposed the | |
government because they had issues with their fathers. The | |
implication was that the proper sphere of human activity is personal, | |
that there is no legitimate reason to engage with public life, that | |
the very act of engaging is juvenile, blindly emotional, a | |
transference of the real sources of passion. What if that government | |
is destroying other human lives, or your own, and is leading to a | |
devastating future? What if a vision of a better world or just, say, | |
a better transit system is a legitimate passion? What if your sense | |
of self is so vast that your well-being includes these broad and | |
idealistic engagements? | |
I don't have a television. For many years the devices seemed like | |
forbidden fruit when I encountered them in hotels and motels, and I | |
would eagerly turn on the TV and look for something to watch. | |
Situation comedies would catch my attention, for several always | |
seemed to be in rerun on the cable channels. In them, the world | |
often seemed reduced to a realm almost without the serious suffering | |
of poverty, illness, and death that puts minor emotional trials in | |
perspective, but without ideals, without larger possibilities beyond | |
pursuing almost always deeply selfish needs (the characters were | |
constantly pitted against each other, and the laugh tracks chimed in | |
most reliably at these moments). If someone aspired to something | |
more, their folly was shown up immediately; even romantic love was | |
always visibly self-serving, delusional, or lecherous. Along with | |
therapy culture, the sitcoms seemed to define down what it means to | |
be human. It wasn't that I condemned them morally; it's just that | |
they made me feel lousy. (Fortunately, in those hotels I could | |
usually find an old movie, or the Weather Channel, with its | |
inexhaustible supply of spectacular disasters, or The Simpsons.) | |
Even best-selling semiliterary novels I picked up seemed to shrink | |
away from the full scope of being human. It was as though the rooms | |
in which the characters lived had no windows, or more terrifying yet, | |
there was nothing outside those windows. We were consigned to the | |
purely personal--it was not the warm home to which we might return | |
from the politics of [Dorothy] Day or the seascapes of Lopez. It was | |
not the shelter at the center of the world, but all that was left: a | |
prison. | |
The human being you recognize in reading, for example, Tom Paine's | |
*Rights of Man* or Nelson Mandela's autobiography is far larger than | |
this creature of family and erotic life. That being has a soul, | |
ethics, ideals, a chance at heroism, at shaping history, a set of | |
motivations based on principles. Paine writes that nature "has not | |
only forced man into society by a diversity of wants that the | |
reciprocal aid of each other can supply, but she has implanted in him | |
a system of social affections, which, though not necessary to his | |
existence, are essential to his happiness. There is no period in | |
life when this love for society ceases to act. It begins and ends | |
with out being." But that love and that happiness have no place in | |
the conventional configuration of who we are and what we should want. | |
We lack the language for that aspect of our existence, the language | |
we need to describe what happens during disaster. | |
# A Tale Of Two Princes: The Halifax Explosion And After | |
At the end of his teens, Le Bon moved to Paris to study medicine and | |
stayed on for seven decades, until his death in 1931, as a prolific | |
writer of books popularizing and sometimes entirely bastardizing the | |
science of the day. Kept at arm's length by the university | |
scientists who covered the same ground, he grew bitter about that... | |
Even his early writings contain harshly dismissive statements about | |
women, the poor, and nonwhite people. ... Behind his writing seethes | |
a European male's incessant anxiety about being overtaken by other | |
categories of human being. Science moved on, but Le Bon did not and | |
only one of his books ever had wide currency, so wide that in many | |
ways we have never recovered from its arguments. | |
In his highly influential *The Crowd*, he proposed that when | |
individuals gather, they lose themselves and are swept along by | |
primordial forces: someone in a crowd "is no longer himself, but has | |
become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will. | |
Moreover, by the mere fact that he forms part of an organised crowd, | |
a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilization. | |
Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a | |
barbarian--that is, a creature acting by instinct..." | |
To believe this is to believe that the very act of agglomerating into | |
groups makes humans go mad and that the public is inherently | |
dangerous. ... Because disasters push the population out into the | |
streets and into collective solutions--community kitchens, emergency | |
shelters, bucket brigades--disaster produces some of the crowds that | |
made Le Bon and his ilk so anxious toward the end of the nineteenth | |
century and into the twentieth. That anxiety never quite dissipated. | |
In the middle of *Catastrophe And Social Change*, Samuel Prince | |
suddenly references Kropotkin. "Catastrophe and the sudden | |
termination of the normal which ensues become the stimuli of heroism | |
and bring into play the great social virtues of generosity and of | |
kindliness--which in one of its forms is mutual aid. The new | |
conditions, perhaps it would be more correct to say, afford the | |
occasion for their release," he writes on page 55, and on the next | |
page he footnotes Kropotkin's 1902 treatise | |
*Mutual Aid: A Factor Of Evolution*. | |
Mutual aid means that every participant is both giver and receiver to | |
acts of care that bind them together, as distinct from the one-way | |
street of charity. In this sense it is reciprocity, a network of | |
people cooperating to meet each others' wants and share each others' | |
wealth. ... People preferred to care for each other rather than to be | |
cared for by strangers or governed by others. | |
... by the time he wrote *Mutual Aid* he was one of the theorists of | |
the political philosophy called *anarchism*. The word means | |
literally, in Greek, "the absence of government." It is often used | |
nowadays as a synonym for mayhem, chaos, and riotous behavior because | |
many imagine that the absence of authority is equally the absence of | |
order. Anarchists are idealists, believing human beings do not need | |
authorities and the threat of violence to govern them but are instead | |
capable of governing themselves by cooperation, negotiation, and | |
mutual aid. They stand on one side of a profound debate about human | |
nature and human possibility. On the other side, the authoritarian | |
pessimists believe that order comes only at the point of a gun or a | |
society stacked with prisons, guards, judges, and punishments. They | |
believe that somehow despite the claimed vileness of the many, the | |
few whom they wish to endow with power will use it justly and | |
prudently, though the evidence for this could most politely be called | |
uneven. The cases drawn from disaster largely contradict this | |
belief. It is often the few in power who behave viciously in | |
disaster, and those few do so often exactly because they subscribe to | |
the fearful beliefs of Huxley, Le Bon, and others. | |
The mainstream has forgotten it now, though it [anarchism] was never | |
an ideology like state socialism or Marxism. Rather, many anarchists | |
argue that they have merely described and analyzed the ancient and | |
widespread ways people organized themselves for millennia, with an | |
emphasis on equality and liberty for all. They were not inventing | |
anything new but reclaiming something ancient. | |
# From The Blitz And The Bomb To Vietnam | |
Naomi Klein's 2007 book *The Shock Doctrine* is a trenchant | |
investigation on how economic policies benefiting elites are thrust | |
upon people in times of crisis. But it describes those people in all | |
the old, unexamined terms and sees the aftermath of disaster as an | |
opportunity for conquest from above rather than a contest of power | |
whose outcome is sometimes populist or even revolutionary. ... In a | |
public talk when the book appeared she said that in extreme crisis | |
"we no longer know who or where we are. We become like children, we | |
look for daddies." If only she had read Fritz. | |
Fritz's first radical premise is that everyday life is already a | |
disaster of sorts, one from which actual disaster liberates us. He | |
points out that people suffer and die daily, though in ordinary | |
times, they do so privately and separately. And he writes, "The | |
traditional contrast between 'normal' and 'disaster' almost always | |
ignores or minimizes these recurrent stresses of everyday life and | |
their personal and social effects. It also ignores a historically | |
consistent and continually growing body of political and social | |
analyses that points to the failure of modern societies to fulfill an | |
individual's basic human needs for community identity." | |
Later he describes more specifically how this community identity is | |
fed during disaster: "The widespread sharing of danger, loss, and | |
deprivation produces an intimate, primarily group solidarity among | |
the survivors, which overcomes social isolation, provides a channel | |
for intimate communication and expression, and provides a major | |
source of physical and emotional support and reassurance... The | |
'outsider' becomes an 'insider,' the 'marginal man' a 'central man.' | |
People are thus able to perceive, with a clarity never before | |
possible, a set of underlying basic values to which all people | |
subscribe. They realize that collective and group goals are | |
inextricably merged. This merging of individual and societal needs | |
provides a feeling of belonging and a sense of unity rarely achieved | |
under normal circumstances." | |
In other words, disaster offers temporary solutions to the alienation | |
and isolations of everyday life. | |
Disasters, unlike everyday troubles... pose straightforward problems | |
to which solutions can be taken in the form of straightforward | |
actions... The ability to address directly and clearly the troubles | |
at hand provides a satisfaction hard to find in other times. | |
For more than a dozen years, the United States strongly encouraged | |
its citizens to build their own fallout shelters. The idea was that | |
after a nuclear war, survival would require sheltering for days, | |
weeks, or months from the radiation before you surfaced to rebuild | |
civilization. ... While Soviets built collective shelters, American | |
citizens were encouraged to build their own: destruction was the | |
government's job, survival was the citizen's. ... The burning | |
question was this: if you built a shelter for yourself and your | |
family--an option available largely to families with backyards, not | |
city dwellers or the poor--would you let the neighbors in? | |
Preparing for this vision of war meant preparing to go to war against | |
the neighbors in their hour of desperation. | |
It was a remarkable moment upon which few remarked: ordinary citizens | |
balked at taking steps for their own survival at others' expense, | |
even in a time of great fear of nuclear war and suspicion that | |
collective solutions and solidarities smacked communism. | |
# Hobbes In Hollywood, Or The Few Versus The Many | |
The basic notion is of people so overwhelmed by fear and selfish | |
desire to survive that their judgment, their social bonds, even their | |
humanity are overwhelmed, and that this can happen almost instantly | |
when things go wrong--the old notion of reversion to brute nature, | |
though out of fear rather than inherent malice. It presumes that we | |
are all easily activated antisocial bombs waiting to go off. Belief | |
in panic provides a premise for treating the public as a problem to | |
be shut out or controlled by the military. Hollywood eagerly feeds | |
those beliefs. Sociologists, however, do not. | |
Charles Fritz's colleague Enrico Quarantelli recalls that in 1954, "I | |
wrote a master's thesis on panic, expecting to find a lot of it, and | |
after a while I said, 'My God, I'm trying to write a thesis about | |
panic and I can't find any instances of it.' That's an | |
overstatement, but... it took a little while to learn that, wait a | |
second, the situation is much better here" than anyone had thought. | |
... Quarantelli, even more than Fritz, went on to become a dynastic | |
head of disaster studies, working with Fritz early on, then becoming | |
a professor and founding the Disaster Research Center at Ohio State | |
University that is now at the University of Delaware. | |
Fifty-three years after the thesis without panic, Quarantelli added, | |
"In fact, most of the disaster funding, even to this day, is based on | |
the notion of how can we prevent people from panicking or engaging in | |
antisocial behavior. So in the early days of disaster studies that | |
was the reason for funding. They just assumed the real problem was | |
the citizens and the people at large, even though the studies from | |
the beginning argued against that." He added, "If by panic one means | |
people being very frightened, that probably is a very correct | |
perception of what occurs at the time of a disaster. Most people in | |
contact with reality get frightened and in fact should get frightened | |
unless they've lost their contact with reality at the time of the | |
disaster. On the other hand it doesn't mean that if people are | |
frightened, they cannot act appropriately." Studies of people in | |
urgently terrifying situations have demonstrated--as Quarantelli puts | |
it in the dry language of his field--that "instead of ruthless | |
competition, the social order did not break down," and that there was | |
"cooperative rather than selfish behavior predominating." | |
Quarantelli states that more than seven hundred studies of disasters | |
demonstrate that panic is a vanishingly rare phenomenon. Subsequent | |
researchers have combed the evidence meticulously--in one case | |
examining the behavior of two thousand people in more than nine | |
hundred fires--and concluded that the behavior was mostly rational, | |
sometimes altruistic, and never about "the beast within" when the | |
thin veneer of civilization is peeled off. Except in the movies and | |
popular imagination. And in the media. And in some remaining | |
disaster plans. A different worldview could emerge from this. | |
Quarantelli remarks that the organizations rather than individuals | |
are the most prone to create problems during a natural disaster. | |
"Bureaucracy depends on routine and schedules and paperwork and etc. | |
If done right--in face, the modern world could not exist without | |
bureaucracy. The only trouble with that is that the bureaucratic | |
framework is one of the worst things to have at the time of disasters | |
when you need innovations and doing things differently. In fact the | |
better they operate during nondisaster times, the less likely they | |
are to operate well. ... On the other hand, human beings, and this | |
cuts across all societies ... rise to the occasion." | |
The distinguishing thing about elite panic as compared to | |
regular-people panic, is that what elites will panic about is the | |
possibility that we will panic. It is simply, more prosaically more | |
important when they panic because they're in positions of influence, | |
positions of power. They're in positions where they can move | |
resources around so they can keep information close to the vest. | |
It's a very paternalistic orientation to governance. It's how you | |
might treat a child. ... Imagining that the public is a danger, they | |
endanger the public. | |
[Lee] Clarke wrote, "Disaster myths are not politically neutral, but | |
rather work systematically to the advantage of elites. Elites cling | |
to the panic myth because to acknowledge the truth of the situation | |
would lead to very different policy prescriptions than the ones | |
currently in vogue. The chief prescription is, she noted, that the | |
best way to prepare for disasters is by following the command and | |
control model... But it is not the bureaucrats who will be the | |
first-responders when the next disaster... comes. It won't even be | |
the police or firefighters. It will be our neighbors, it will be the | |
strangers in the next car, it will be our family members. The | |
effectiveness of disaster response is thus diminished to the degree | |
that we overrely on command and control. This is another case where | |
political ideology trumps good scientific knowledge about how the | |
world works." | |
At large in disaster are two populations: a great majority that tends | |
toward altruism and mutual aid and a minority whose callousness and | |
self-interest often becomes a second disaster. The majority often | |
act against their own presumptive beliefs in selfishness and | |
competition, but the minority sticks to its ideology. Disaster | |
cannot liberate them, even while many others find themselves in an | |
unfamiliar world playing unfamiliar roles. | |
# The City Transfigured: New York In Grief And Glory | |
Tricia Wachtendorf, a disaster sociologist who spent considerable | |
time in New York during the aftermath of September 11, comments that | |
convergent volunteers often irk officials because "the appearance of | |
these groups suggests the inadequacy of official response efforts." | |
She describes how goods managed by groups like Mueller's and Smith's | |
were called "rebel food" and "renegade supplies." | |
But if the popular aftermath was a festival of mutual aid, altruism, | |
improvisation, and solidarity, then the institutional aftermath was | |
elite panic at its most damaging. And that slower response largely | |
overpowered the carnival of compassion that had taken place on the | |
streets of New York. | |
"When the plane that hit the Pentagon and the plane that crashed in | |
Pennsylvania are looked at side by side, they reveal two different | |
conceptions of national defense: one model is authoritarian, | |
centralized, top-down; the other, operating in a civil frame, is | |
distributed and egalitarian. Should anything be inferred from the | |
fact that the first form of defense failed and the second succeeded?" | |
... The mainstream narrative crafted from the ruins of September 11 | |
did not recognize the enormous power of the unarmed public or the | |
comparative helplessness of the world's mightiest military and of | |
centralized institutions generally. | |
While the Pentagon failed to act, citizens took dramatic action | |
inside Flight 93, possibly because of the passengers' quick | |
collective decisions and actions. It was not only a moment of mutual | |
aid and altruism but also a moment of participator democracy at the | |
forum of Union Square, at the dispensaries, impromptu kitchens, and | |
volunteer efforts all over the city. People decided to do something, | |
banded together--usually with strangers--and made it happen. | |
# New Orleans: Common Grounds And Killers | |
But that young medic [Aislyn Colgan] from Oakland, California, a | |
sturdy fair-haired woman with a broad, honest face, also told me, "In | |
Algiers, a lot of people in the white neighborhood formed vigilante | |
groups. They got into their vehicles and drove around. More than | |
once person told me, told me personally, that yes, 'We shot seven | |
people and we killed them.' Or 'We killed five people and we don't | |
know what happened to the other two.' Or 'It was four and three.' | |
... But that was what was scary to me: people have this capacity for | |
good but also this tremendous capacity for evil. One of the most | |
intense conversations I had was with this woman who said: 'They were | |
coming for our TV and we had to shoot them. If we hadn't shot them, | |
they would have come back with their brothers and killed us.' I | |
think the same thing that brought people to completely rearrange | |
their priorities, to be like 'Whatever I'm going to do, I;m going to | |
rescue you, if that means I have to get this refrigerator to float | |
and pole you back one by one I'm going to do it.' I think the same | |
kind of response was 'You are not going to get near my house.' It | |
made people crazy." | |
The murders were no secret. There were plenty of rumors, but the | |
evidence was there. When I mentioned them, some people looked ad me | |
as if I was a gullible, overwrought bleeding-heart outsider, and then | |
paused thoughtfully and said, "Well, actually..." Then they'd add a | |
new detail... | |
More than a million people saw the premiere of Spike Lee's 2006 HBO | |
documentary, When the Levees Broke. It includes an interview with | |
Donnell Herrington of Algiers, a sturdy, soft-spoken African American | |
guy not nearly as tall as his basketball college scholarship would | |
suggest. | |
Spike Lee found him and put him in When the Levees Broke. Standing | |
on the levees near the Algiers ferry, he told just the story of how | |
he was shot by vigilantes, not who he was and what he had done | |
before, or what happened afterward. On camera in that film that was | |
seen by so many millions of people, Donnell pulled up his shirt and | |
said, "This is the buck-shots from the shotgun." His torso was | |
peppered with lumps. And then he gestured at the long, twisting | |
raised scar that wound around his neck like a centipede or snake. | |
"And this is the incision from the surgery from the buckshots that | |
penetrated my neck and hit my jugular vein." A man described his | |
attempted murder on nationwide television, and no one thought to | |
investigate? Even Spike Lee, who devoted a whole documentary to the | |
murder of four little girls during the civil rights era, just cut | |
away to news footage of Governor Blanco announcing that they were | |
going to restore law and order. | |
Lee's film was the most widely available piece of evidence. But I'd | |
also offered the journalist a copy of another documentary. Danish | |
filmmaker Rasmus Holm's ironically titled Welcome to New Orleans, | |
which focused on the events in Algiers Point. In it, longtime | |
Algiers resident Malik Rahim showed the camera the body of a black | |
man lying on his face near the street, bloated from the heat, | |
abandoned. As he also told the nationally syndicated news program | |
Democracy Now, "During the aftermath, directly after the flooding, in | |
New Orleans, hunting season began on young African American men. In | |
Algiers, I believe, approximately around eighteen African American | |
males were killed. No one really knows what's the overall count. | |
And it was basically murder. It was murder by either the police or | |
by vigilantes that was allowed to run amok." | |
There were bodies lying on the street in the place that had never | |
flooded, the comparatively undamaged place where no one was dying of | |
thirst or heatstroke. A lot of people seemed reluctant to take the | |
word of Rahim... There was Herrington's testimony, and the mute | |
testimony of his savaged body. And on Holm's film there were | |
vigilante confessions, if confession is the right word for cheer, | |
beer-enhanced boasting. At a barbecue the Dane managed to attend | |
shortly after Katrina, a stocky white guy with receding white hair | |
and a Key West T-Shirt chortled, "I never thought eleven months ago | |
I'd be walking down the streets of New Orleans with two .38s and a | |
shotgun over my shoulder. It was great. It was like pheasant | |
season in South Dakota. If it moved, you shot it." | |
A tough woman with short hair and chubby arms added, "That's not a | |
pheasant and we're not in South Dakota. What's wrong with this | |
picture?" | |
The man said happily, "Seemed like it at the time." | |
A second white-haired guy explained, "You had to do what you had to | |
do. If you had to shoot somebody, you had to shoot. It's that | |
simple." | |
A third said, "We shot 'em." | |
The woman said, "They were looters. In this neighborhood we take | |
care of our own." | |
And the last man to speak added, "You know what? Algiers Point is | |
not a pussy community." | |
Here was the marauding, murdering gang the media had been obsessed | |
with, except that it was made up of old white people, and its public | |
actions went unnoticed. | |
Moved to anguish over the murders, I vowed to Rahim that I would get | |
them investigated and exposed. Eventually, I brought together the | |
Nation magazine with the best and most fearless investigative | |
journalist I know, A.C. Thompson, and handed over my evidence and | |
contacts. | |
He'd become close to Donnell Herrington. And he'd talked to the | |
vigilantes, who unlike even convicted killers doing life without | |
parole he'd investigated for other investigations, readily confessed | |
to murder. Boasted of it, really. One guy who took him home to show | |
him incriminating videotape and photographs of what he and his | |
companions had done said, "People think it's a myth. But we killed | |
people." The vigilantes told Adam that they'd shot three black men | |
one morning and that they knew they were looters, because they had | |
two tote bags with them. The bags were full of nice sports apparel. | |
Definitive evidence. ... But it wasn't his job to educate them, just | |
to let them talk. | |
And they talked. The vigilantes had gotten the keys of some of their | |
neighbors who'd evacuated, set up barricades--even felling trees--to | |
slow down people's movement through their area, accumulated an | |
arsenal, and gone on patrol. Unfortunately, they were also between | |
the rest of New Orleans Parish and the ferry terminal from which | |
people were being evacuated; a lot of people had good reason as well | |
as every right to walk through those streets. | |
One balmy September afternoon in 2008, A.C., Donnell, and I sat at a | |
picnic table in New Orleans's City Park under the spreading oak trees | |
with the ferns running up their thick arms and the Spanish moss | |
dripping down their fingers. Big black butterflies flitted through | |
the soft, humid air, and squirrels chased each other around the | |
trees. ... Donnell [Herrington] told us in a soft, level voice that | |
he had seen, done, and suffered during those three days. His story | |
arcs through the best and worst of disasters and human behavior. | |
Before Herrington was a victim he was a rescuer. He saved old people. | |
He saved children. He saved family. He saved the neighbors. He | |
saved strangers. The twenty-nine-year-old could have evacuated | |
[from] his hometown, New Orleans, as Hurricane Katrina approached, | |
but he couldn't bring himself to leave his grandparents. Their home | |
in the St. Bernard housing project out near City Park on the north | |
side of town weathered the hurricane fine, but later that day the | |
water began to rise, mysteriously, horrifically, until it had filled | |
the first floor of the buildings all around and what had once been a | |
city was a weird lake. No help appeared, but word spread that if you | |
could get to the elevated interstate you could get evacuated from the | |
flooded city. Some of the stranded people, like his grandparents, | |
were frail; some couldn't swim. | |
Herrington was strong, and so he found an inner tube and got into the | |
vile water to look for a boat. "Another cousin of mine, just when we | |
were thinking there was no hope, came along with a boat. I told him | |
'Let's get our grandparents.' That's when I started helping people | |
throughout the neighborhood." Herrington stood in the prow of the | |
small skiff, and he and a few friends poled the boat along through | |
the murky waters with the submerged cars, stop signs, and other | |
obstacles. They continued rescuing into the night, when the city | |
without power became darker than he'd ever seen it before. On one of | |
their night-rescue journeys, the one with his female cousins and | |
their small children, they nearly flipped the boat, and Herrington | |
recalls, "I was thinking, Lord, don't let it tip over because we had | |
babies on board, and if the babies wouldn't fallen into the water, we | |
probably couldn't have saved some of them because it was too dark for | |
us to see." He estimates that in the four hours they were in the | |
boat, they transported more than a hundred people from the flooded | |
neighborhood to the interstate. | |
At daybreak, he, his cousin Marcel Alexander, then seventeen year | |
old, and their friend Chris Collins set out walking the several miles | |
on the freeway to downtown New Orleans, hoping to find help for his | |
grandparents, who were sleeping on the asphalt with everyone else. | |
"I saw some crazy, crazy, crazy things... One young lady was having | |
a baby on the interstate. I saw people dead on the interstate, some | |
older people who just couldn't--it was crazy. I was just passing | |
people up. My heart was going out to these people." He wasn't even | |
allowed to get near the Convention Center, where thousands of | |
evacuees would end up stranded, or the Superdome, and he wasn't | |
allowed to walk back up the interstate to check on his family. At | |
that point he was close to the Crescent City Connection, the bridge | |
across the Mississippi, and so Herrington decided to just walk | |
several more miles to the Algiers home to which he and his girlfriend | |
had moved a year earlier. Alexander and Collins came with him. | |
The apocalypse continued unfolding. Nothing was flooded over there, | |
but a huge branch from the pine tree in front of his rented townhouse | |
had smashed in the roof of the place, and it was not habitable. Most | |
people had evacuated, and the place felt like a ghost town. One of | |
the few remaining neighbors told him that people on the West Bank | |
were being evacuated from the Algiers Point Ferry a few miles further | |
on. His cousin was worried about their family and on the verge of | |
tears. "I kinda felt responsible for him, and I kept telling him | |
'You gonna be okay. You gonna be all right.'" The three young black | |
men set out for the ferry, though Herrington didn't know the way | |
exactly. They ran into another man and struck up a conversation | |
with him. He gave them directions, and told them that he had a | |
generator but was going to evacuate to Atlanta when he fixed a flat | |
tire, and told them too that maybe the neighbors who miraculously had | |
a working phone might let them use it. They did. Herrington called | |
his family and assured them that he was okay, though in a few moments | |
he would not be. | |
As they continued their journey, the guy with the flat said, "'Be | |
careful because these guys are walking around the area with shotguns,' | |
but I wasn't paying that no mind." A few blocks later, while | |
Herrington had his head turned to talk to Alexander, a man he didn't | |
even see stepped out and pulled the trigger on a shotgun. "It | |
happened so fast I didn't even hear the loud boom. Like i said, I | |
felt a lot of pressure in my neck and it lifted me off my feet and I | |
hit the ground and I didn't know what actually happened and I kinda | |
blanked out for a second and my vision was kinda blurry, and when I | |
opened my eyes I saw my cousin standing over me and I looked down at | |
my arms and everything, and some of the shots hit me in my arms, my | |
neck, my chest, all over my body." His jugular vein had been | |
punctured and the blood began to spurt out of his neck. Marcel stood | |
over him, overwhelmed with horror, and Herrington looked past him to | |
see the stout middle-aged man reloading and told his cousin to run. | |
Facing death, he was still taking care of his family. | |
"So I'm looking at the guy walking toward me and he was walking | |
pretty slow, and that was because he was trying to get the rest of | |
the gauges in the shotgun. And at this point I'm on the ground and | |
I'm praying, "God, please, don't let this guy stand over me and shoot | |
me, try and take care of my life." He got to his feet, but his way | |
was obstructed by the branches the vigilantes in Algiers Point had | |
scattered around when they decided to turn their neighborhood into a | |
death trap. As he tried to hop over one of them, he heard another | |
boom. The would-be murderer had shot him in the back, and the blow | |
knocked him down again. He got up, walked on, and asked the first | |
people he saw for help but they drove him off their porch. He | |
managed to stagger onward. He asked some shirtless white guys in a | |
truck for help, but they called him a n----- and one of them said, | |
"We're liable to shoot you ourselves." He managed to stay on his | |
feet long enough to reach the house of the guy who had warned him a | |
few minutes earlier about the men with shotguns. | |
You had to believe, first, that all African American men are | |
criminals and intruders and, second, that people in a disaster have a | |
pressing interest in acquiring private property to act as the | |
vigilantes did believe. Deciding Donnell was a looter was crazy. He | |
was a Brink's truck driver routinely trusted with hundreds of | |
thousands of dollars who was evacuating with a lot of his money in | |
his pocket and no interest in taking someone's TV on his way to the | |
ferry. He was a rescuer who'd just saved many lives. He was a kind | |
man who told us later on, "I prayed about this situation and | |
everything. I asked God to forgive those guys that done this thing | |
to me; it was kind of hard to even bring myself to do that, but I | |
know it's the right thing to do. But at the same time those guys | |
have gotta answer for their actions." So far they haven't. | |
He was a rescuer. Then he had been a victim. In the last act of his | |
extraordinary journal through Katrina's flooded cityscapes and | |
desperate people, he was rescued. While the man who'd warned him | |
worked on his flat tire his girlfriend and her mother took him into | |
the house and tried to care for him while they figured out what to do | |
next. Donnell recalls, "Your life is in your blood; when your blood | |
is draining like that it's like your life is draining in a certain | |
sense. I was actually fainting, you know, I was weak. I was pretty | |
weak at that time; it's a strange feeling, then at the same time your | |
heart is racing and your minds is telling you that you're about to | |
die." The younger woman saw the vigilantes in the street looking for | |
Herrington to finish him off. After Donnell was shot, two younger | |
men with guns had terrorized Alexander and Collins with racial | |
insults, death threats, and a pistol-whipping, and these vigilantes | |
came by to finish off Donnell. The younger woman kept them off the | |
property until her boyfriend, armed, stepped in, though maybe it was | |
the woman's threat to contact the [police that sent the vigilantes | |
scurrying. The guy changed his tire in a hurry, and they got Donnell | |
into the backseat. They drove to West Jefferson Medical Center and | |
were told by a doctor in the parking lot that they were not accepting | |
any more people. The young woman argued with them, a doctor took a | |
look, signaled for a stretcher, and Donnell was on his way to the | |
emergency room to get his jugular repaired, just in time. In his | |
medical chart, the doctors estimate he had lost two liters of blood, | |
nearly half the blood in the body of the ordinary human being. But | |
he lived. | |
... each of the several sources A.C. found describes different murders. | |
... Henry Glover, age thirty-one, and his brother Edwin King were | |
walking near a Chuck E. Cheese's place in Algiers mall when shots | |
rang out, and Glover was severely wounded. A man with a Chevy Malibu | |
picked them up and decided the hospital was too far away. He thought | |
perhaps the police would administer first aid and drive Glover to the | |
elementary school, where a police team was holed up. The police | |
responded, Adam said, "by gutting aggressive instead of rendering | |
help." They beat up King and his friend, smacked on of them in the | |
face with an assault rifle. "Meanwhile there's poor Henry in the | |
back of the car bleeding, and no one's doing anything." The police | |
took the men's wallets and marched them out of the area on foot. | |
"They last they saw of Henry and the Malibu was an officer with | |
flares in his pocket getting into the car and driving off. When they | |
finally located the car and Henry, the car was on the levee a short | |
distance behind the Fourth District Police Station, and the coroner | |
had Henry's charred remains. There was no car left and very little | |
left of Henry Glover."--just a skull, some ribs, and a femur, and a | |
car "burned beyond belief." A.C. thinks someone took Glover's skull | |
as a souvenir, because it was there in the police photographs but not | |
in the coroner's report. | |
A homicide detective told A.C that he was instructed not to | |
investigate any homicides at that time. "We hear around the station | |
that the guy had been a looter, shot for being a looter." He added | |
that the tactical unit people were crazy and that he thought someone | |
in law enforcement burned up Glover's body, possibly with a | |
flash-bang grenade taken from the nearby National Guard facility, | |
when it began to smell. "Ever smell a dead body?" he asked. That | |
detective quit the force because of everything that had happened | |
during Katrina, he said to A.C., including shoot-outs between looting | |
cops and law-abiding cops. The police had a substation in the mall, | |
and perhaps they shot Henry. But no one in New Orleans was | |
investigating some charred human ribs with a bullet in them behind a | |
police station. Or a man who'd testified on national television | |
about his near murder and shown the evidence written across his body. | |
Or the suppression of hundreds of coroners' records of autopsied | |
Katrina victims. | |
Like elites when they panic, racists imagine again and again that | |
without them utter savagery would break out, so that their own | |
homicidal violence is in defense of civilization and the preservation | |
of order. | |
Almost no one was eager to tell the other story of bands of heavily | |
armed white men, affluent ones in Uptown, blue collar ones in Algiers | |
Point. If the facts don't fit the beliefs, murders in plain view can | |
go largely unnoticed. | |
Not every disaster feature elite panic or failed evacuations. The | |
1973 volcanic eruption on Heimaey in the Westmann Isles off the coast | |
of Iceland early in the dark morning of January 23, 1973, was a | |
surprise. Even so, within six hours, the many boats docked near the | |
town managed to evacuate nearly all fifty-three hundred residents | |
safely. Lava flowed for six months, buried a third of the town, and | |
the community spent a few years in exile from the heat, damage, and | |
fumes, then rebuilt and returned, with little of the social drama of | |
other disasters. Iceland has a poor tradition of official political | |
participation but a rich one in social connection, both due perhaps | |
to the tiny size and rural background of the homogenous population. | |
An evacuation plan was in place when the volcano erupted, and people | |
acted on it. | |
The island of Cuba is nearly the same size as Iceland but it is in | |
every other way profoundly different. It too has an effective civil | |
defense system for the hurricanes that come more frequently but with | |
far more warning than most volcanic eruptions. Cuba's government has | |
instituted disaster education, an early-warning system, good | |
meteorological research, emergency communications that work, | |
emergency plans, and civil defense systems--the whole panoply of | |
possibilities to ensure that people survive the hurricanes that | |
regularly scour the island. ... Cuban civil society matters too: | |
people check in on each other, urge holdouts to come along, and | |
generally prevent the kind of isolation that stranded many in Katrina | |
or in the Chicago heat wave. A Jamaican writing about the | |
devastating Caribbean hurricanes of 2008 commented, "Cuba is | |
organized as a mutual aid society in which every citizen has his | |
responsibilities, his duties, and his place. When hurricanes threaten | |
Cuba, people move out of the way guided by the neighbourhood | |
Committees for the Defense of the Revolution--CDR. ... Here is a | |
truly incredible fact. Last week the Cubans moved 2,615,000 | |
people--a number nearly equivalent to the entire population of | |
Jamaica--to safety. Four people died in the storm, the first | |
fatalities for years. It is a remarkable statistic. Three years ago | |
when Texas tried to evacuate a million or so head of hurricane Rita, | |
more than 100 people died in the evacuation." | |
Those who talk about civil society sometimes call what makes Cuban | |
disaster society work *social capital*, an odd term for the only | |
avowedly Communist nation in the hemisphere, but this wealth of | |
connection and care has been in Cuba, as in so many other places, | |
critical to survival. | |
author: Solnit, Rebecca | |
detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/A_Paradise_Built_in_Hell | |
LOC: HV553 .S59 | |
tags: book,community,history,non-fiction | |
title: A Paradise Built In Hell | |
# Tags | |
book | |
community | |
history | |
non-fiction |