Delta Blues By Mike Roselle

I was in San Francisco for the Quake of ‘89. The Loma Prieta Earthquake destroyed a large part of downtown Oakland but if you were watching TV you would have seen mostly scenes of the exclusive Marina District burning or the collapsed East Bay freeway. The famous North Beach Pleasure Palace, long occupied by Randy Hayes, had suffered little damage, but all the bars in North Beach were closed. Since this was an emergency, and the Oakland Bridge had collapsed, famous Australian Lowbagger Patrick Anderson and my future second wife Claire and I drove over the Golden Gate Bridge to San Rafael and over the Richmond Bridge into Berkeley where the bars were still open. Berkeley turned out to be so boring that we bought a bottle of Scotch and drove back again over both bridges to San Francisco and partied in the street amidst great chaos. It was almost as if the Forty Niners had won another Superbowl, except that there wasn’t any looting or violence.

Meanwhile, at the time of the Quake of ’89, Seeds of Peace (our favorite Lowbagger organization) had a house in Oakland and a lot of leftover equipment from the Great Peace March. They rushed to the local Red Cross office only to find out that they had little working equipment or practical experience dealing with large numbers of suddenly homeless and mostly low-income people. Seeds of Peace took over command of the whole operation and were serving breakfast to thousands of people by sunrise.

It was not lost on anybody familiar with the Loma Prieta operation that these urban refugees were mostly poor, mostly black. By not preparing for what was certainly coming, the government and the large relief organizations had failed the citizens of Oakland and left the most vulnerable among them, including manly of the elderly and very young children, with out any services, while the better off were in hotels or staying with relatives.

So now comes Osama bin Nature once again, in an event that was certainly coming, and this time the grand failures of our emergency management response is repeated on a grand scale. This is how it is: The poor are completely abandoned while the National Guard is mostly off guarding oil fields and recruiting more Al-Qaida soldiers in Iraq.

As a nation, we have become numb to the suffering of black people. We have watched them die by the millions on our TV screens while the crawler across the bottom announces that Brad and Jennifer had not after all, broken up. But when the consequences of our inattention rise to the level of what we are seeing in southern Louisiana, we cannot deny that global warming is going to affect poor people in a more devastating way.

New Orleans is not just a big city, nor just a big city with a large black or low-income population. New Orleans is unlike any other place in the world. Its people are unlike any other. A gigantic hole has swallowed one of the world’s most beloved cities, and the federal government can’t even get a crate of water and some MRE’s to the downtown convention center, where the desperate are trapped in a living hell. And, of course, that same government is responsible for this whole horrible situation in the first place by pushing an energy policy that environmentalists had been warning for years would result in just such a catastrophe. This includes the loss of protective coastal wetlands by oilfield development and the impact of the regions fossil fuel production on the Earth’s atmosphere.

Make no mistake, the tragedy in New Orleans will be repeated a thousand times unless carbon emissions are drastically reduced. The President says this will harm our economy. I say to George W. Bush, you have seen the bodies float by in America’s greatest city. Is this worth the price of cheap gas? Are we willing to sacrifice not only the poor of the third world but our own poor citizens for our gluttony? Is this the lifestyle we want for the Iraqis?

A lot of our troops from the Big Easy are probably glad they were in Baghdad and not the Superdome last week. Thirty percent of the police force deserted in New Orleans, more than in Falujah. Some were looting. It is beyond absurd to say that we have anything near “Homeland Security”. How can we say we are ready for the most urgent threats to our security that come not from Al Qaida, but from Al Gaia? We would have saved more American lives if we had rushed in to restore the Gulf Coast wetlands, as many ecologists had urged, than invading an oilfield on the other side of the planet. We could have saved many more lives if we humanely responded to these kinds of foreseeable tragedies, not just in the U.S., but everywhere. We could have saved many more lives if George W. Bush cared more about poor people and the environment than he does about the stock holders at Haliburton.

What happened in New Orleans makes the destruction of Lower Manhattan seem minor league. But this time it was not a terrorist sleeper cell flying the bomb, it was a government hell bent on flooding the market with cheap oil, gas and coal in order to encourage increased consumption, and increased profits for the climate criminals. After New York and Washington were attacked, George W. Bush invaded Afghanistan to destroy the infrastructure of the enemy. We think he should invade Houston, Dallas and Oklahoma City to take control of the Oil Fields and arrest the criminals responsible for what will surely be one of America’s greatest preventable tragedies. We also think its well past time for an international emergency response capability that treats all people equal, no mater their color or income. If we can send tanks, we can send food and doctors. If we can build fortified airfields half way around the world, we can certainly rescue people in the parking lot of the Superdome.

The only good thing I can imagine coming out of a disaster like Hurricane Katrina is that maybe now Americans will look at the way we live and see how it affects others far away. It is too soon to say that we have lost the city of New Orleans. The spirit of the Big Easy will be hard to kill, and its influence of global culture will outlive even our age of oil and gluttony, but if we have lost this Great City, how are we going to act between now and the next predictable disaster? Will America be watching the bodies float by on TV relieved that it is not them, or will they demand a real Homeland Security policy, one that respects the power of nature to both protect and destroy, and respects the dignity of all people in an emergency, not just the white and wealthy.

Mike Roselle responded to the Quake of ’89 by drinking Scotch, while Seeds of Peace fed the underprivileged.