After the Flood

Tikkun Magazine, November/December 2005

EDITORIAL

by Michael Lerner

It didn't have to happen. And it didn't have to result in so many deaths and social chaos. There is much to be learned, and there are many ways to move forward.

Hurricane Katrina represents a classic case of the law of karma. In a key section of the Jewish prayer service, the Shema, we recite a passage from the Torah that warns of environmental disaster ("And it shall come to pass, if you pay attention to the path I've shown you ..."), unless we create the just and loving society the commandments require. Scientists who study global warming talk about watching the chickens come home to roost, saying that what goes around comes around.

Environmentalists make a strong case that the growing number and ferocity of hurricanes is a direct product of global warming, caused in large part by our reliance on fossil fuels. Meteorologists similarly argue that the frequency and intensity of hurricanes, and perhaps of tsunamis, are increasing as a direct result of the warming of the seas. The persistent refusal of the United States to join the nations of the world in implementing the Kyoto Accords emission limits and to impose serious pollution restrictions on cars are major factors in global warming.

Residential and commercial development along the shores of the Mississippi, combined with massive oil and gas investments along Gulf Coast shorelines, destroyed the natural protections from storms that the region's coastal wetlands had previously provided. According to the Times-Picayune, funds that were specifically allocated to rebuild New Orleans's levees and improve its storm defenses were cut from the federal budget so that President Bush could use these moneys to wage war in Iraq and increase funding for homeland security initiatives. The hundreds of billions of dollars now needed for rebuilding could have been saved had the federal government spent a fraction of that amount on the preventative measures that everyone knew were necessary to avoid such a catastrophic natural disaster.

The white majority of the people of Louisiana helped re-elect President Bush, and have elected congressional representatives who enthusiastically support the war in Iraq and the Bush Administration's irresponsible environmental policies. When economic devastation hit workers in Northern cities over the past several decades, Louisianans voted to downsize the federal government and to let citizens fend for themselves. Some talked about the glories of relying on the free market rather than on the "handouts" from a national government that they abhorred. Or they told the poor and the homeless in Northern cities that if they worked harder, had better habits, or were smarter, they'd be employed and wouldn't have to depend on others' help. Or they saw the suffering of others as "the hand of God."

And yet, the law of karma or the warnings of Torah don't work on a one-to-one basis, delivering "just rewards" to those who have been directly involved in causing evil, as Job noted in the Bible, and as we can note watching global warming play out. The terrible truth is that the poor and the most vulnerable are always the first to suffer. The wealthy built their homes on higher ground, had better information, more insurance, and more avenues of escape. When facing the rising waters—whether it's in Bangladesh or Malaysia or Louisiana and Mississippi—it's going to be "the least among us" who will suffer most immediately.

This is why it is inappropriate to blame the victim: because the way the world has been created, the consequences of past social injustice, war, and ecological irresponsibility are indiscriminate; they haunt everybody. From a cosmic perspective, we are one. We are all interdependent. Thus, those who suffer most are frequently those who least deserve it.

When some Christian fundamentalists talk about natural disasters like Katrina as signs of an impending apocalypse, they are laughed off as irrational cranks. It's true that these fundamentalists see no connection between natural disasters and the reckless environmental policies of the politicians they support. And some religious figures, such as Sephardi ultra-Orthodox leader Ovadia Yosef, rationalize Katrina as God punishing America for supporting the Disengagement, while some Christian fundamentalists point to a planned conference of homosexuals in New Orleans as God's reason for intervening. Such interpretations of the catastrophe can't be dismissed simply because their politics are bad. They intuit that there is a relationship between environmental crises and human behavior, even if they don't quite get what that connection is. If they understood that it was the selfishness and immorality of corporate plundering of the earth that is causing global warming, which is manifest in tsunamis and hurricanes of greater intensity and frequency, they'd have a more appropriate target for their outrage.

The fundamentalist message is deeply misleading because it suggests that people have no control over their own lives. For them everything happens for a reason, and so these environmental disasters are inevitable. They are not. The Bible insists that the choice between life and death is in our hands. After laying out the consequences of abandoning a path of justice and righteousness, the Torah makes it clear that it is up to us. Choose life, it tells us.

Choosing life means transforming our social system in ways that neither Democrats nor Republicans have yet been willing to consider—toward a New Bottom Line of love and caring, kindness and generosity, ethical and ecological responsibility, and awe and wonder at the grandeur of the universe; and away from a narrow utilitarian approach to nature.

Absent from the responses of our national leaders was the ability to respond with love and caring to the suffering that was being repeatedly broadcast on our television screens. For well over a month after the hurricane took place, America was continually reminded of the economic and racial specificity of Katrina's victims. Overwhelmingly African American and poor, those suffering reminded America of the racism and poverty that continue to plague it.

Of course, conservative media pundits and politicians did everything possible to minimize public empathy for hurricane victims by claiming that there was massive looting and raping. Subsequent reports show that while some of this did indeed take place, much of the looting, for example, was done out of necessity. Curiously, it wasn't labeled "looting" when television or newspaper pictures depicted white people scavenging for necessities.

But even with these diversionary efforts, the humanity of many in the media overwhelmed ideology, and the reporters on the ground began to break out of the normal "objective mode" of reporting and respond as real human beings to the suffering of others. For a brief moment, the corporate media was unable to hide the suffering of the powerless, which is, after all, a daily reality in America and around the world—even when there is no hurricane.

The problem is that the humanity of the American people, touched at that moment, is usually unnoticed in the political debates that go on in Washington. What too frequently happens with disasters like this is that everyone gets momentarily worked up about helping the victims, then a few weeks later the whole thing is forgotten. Rarely do we get a serious discussion (much less follow-through) about how to solve the underlying problems. Let's not let that happen again.

For me, this is a prayerful moment. American society needs to repent for what it is doing to the earth, and make a dramatic turnabout.

The Bush Administration and Republicans in Congress have predictably focused on rebuilding the housing and industry that will benefit the wealthy with large spending programs and attempts to fund their corporate cronies with huge construction contracts. They have had pathetically little to offer the poor, the sick, and the powerless. Not surprisingly, it will be mostly African Americans whose needs are ignored in the rebuilding process, though the President acknowledged that current poverty is connected with a long history of racial discrimination. Meanwhile, the massive spending program that the Republicans will administer is likely to be another opportunity for corporate plunder. To their shame, Republicans are using this moment to suspend more environmental, health, safety, and minimum wage protections for the poor while seeking tax cuts for the wealthy, allegedly to spur reinvestment.

Unfortunately, Democrats have been far too timid in responding to the failures of the Bush Administration, concentrating their criticisms on the competence of the federal response, but largely ignoring the underlying economic and racial issues that systematically place the poorest and most vulnerable at highest risk. Without strong intervention on behalf of the poor, reconstruction and resettlement efforts will again be tilted in ways that are insensitive to the most vulnerable. We've already seen this process begin: people being moved from New Orleans into cities where they are given priority access to under-funded city services, thereby pushing the poor and homeless of those cities away from the already inadequate services available. Rather than pit these new victims against the victims of past injuries (including the injuries inflicted by downturns in the economy and the relocation of jobs overseas), we need a comprehensive plan to eliminate domestic poverty.

The dangers here are dramatic. The Republicans, crying fiscal restraint and budgetary poverty, are proposing that the rebuilding of New Orleans be financed without any restoration of taxes on the rich or cuts in the defense budget, but instead through cuts in social programs. For example, according to "Operation Offset," a spending cut-plan sponsored by the Republican Study Committee and published on Sept 21, funding would be eliminated for nearly 6,000 federal projects, including the Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation, the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, the Minority Business Development Agency, the Legal Services Corporation, state and community grants for energy conservation, and federal grants for wastewater infrastructure. Thus the poverty and ecological irresponsibility that led to the disaster in the first place will now be spread to other cities, and the people who will be asked to bear the greatest burden will be the most needy and vulnerable. This is so immoral and disgusting that it is almost beneath contempt.

The alleged fiscal problems are all tied up with the real priorities of the Republicans (and too often a significant "centrist" section of the Democratic Party as well): serve the rich (who, coincidentally, provide the bulk of funds raised from Americans for political campaigns) and let the poor fend for themselves. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities demonstrated in a report September 19, "the rhetoric about an explosion in federal spending is not supported by the facts." The report goes on to make the following points: Even with the hefty Katrina relief and recovery costs, total projected federal spending will be lower, as a share of the economy, than federal spending in every year from 1975 through 1996. Even with the large relief and recovery costs, deficits will stem more from lower-than-normal levels of tax revenue than from unusually high levels of spending. The tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 cost more each year than the total amount likely to be spent on Katrina.

The cost of the tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 is $225 billion this year alone and will climb to higher levels each year in the future, as more of the tax cuts enacted in 2001 take full effect. The costs of the war in Iraq also are likely to exceed the costs of Katrina. According to the Congressional Research Service, a total of $192 billion has been appropriated for the war in Iraq. Spending for Katrina will add relatively little to the large deficits already projected for the next 10 years.

If total funding for the response to Katrina equals $150 billion, the deficit will be increased by a total of $230 billion over the next ten years ($150 billion in direct costs, plus $80 billion to pay interest on the $150 billion that will have to be borrowed and thus will be added to the debt). This will be on top of the deficit of $4.5 trillion projected for 2006 through 2015 without the hurricane's costs. The projected deficit thus will be increased by about five percent.

Our Domestic Marshall Plan would cost much more, and could only be offset by a full reversal of the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, a move that is now politically possible were it to be presented in a framework that fully explained to the American people the costs of not stopping global warming and not eliminating poverty.

But to get mass support, we face one of the underlying ideological issues that the Democrats must address powerfully and repeatedly: the mythology of the "deserving poor" versus the "undeserving poor." The American people have been taught that victims of a hurricane, flood, fire, or earthquake are "deserving" because they were simply victims of something out of their control. On the other hand, the millions of poor and homeless people in our country are seen as "undeserving" because, the story goes, they didn't work hard enough, get the right skills, or maintain the right work habits to get a job. Though Americans know that many of their jobs have been shipped out of the United States as corporations seek a cheaper workforce and unregulated manufacturing conditions, the existence of a small group of people who will not work or who seek to scam the system is used as slander against all poor persons, who are dismissed as "undeserving" of both work and state protections.

This same fundamental mythology is then applied to people around the world, as though they had brought their economic misery on themselves, as though it had nothing to do with the international capitalist marketplace and the conditions that have been created by the legacy of colonialism and Western economic domination.

What Americans need is a leadership that can state unequivocally that not only every U.S. citizen, but every human being on this planet, is equally deserving of our caring, and that any solution to our problems in America requires a new understanding of the interconnectedness of all with all, of our mutual interdependency. And, if the Democrats had an ounce of spiritual sensitivity, they might add that this recognition flows also from our connection to the sacred and from our recognition of the biblical truth that all human beings are created in the image of God and as such should be treated with dignity and respect. As the Bible makes clear, from this follows our responsibility to care for every person and to give priority attention to the needs of the poor and the powerless. In a spiritual view of the world, there is no such thing as "undeserving poor."

Moreover, it is precisely distinctions like "deserving" or "undeserving" that make it so hard to mobilize people into politics. When people feel that they are being asked to work for the general interest, rather than for some particular interest to which they feel connected, they are less motivated. Americans would like to help the citizens of New Orleans, but their level of interest is much less likely to be sustained by that than by a vision that would touch their own communities as well. That's why the New Deal generated far more excitement than the reconstruction proposal the Democrats floated in mid-September.

In early September, we proposed a massive Domestic Marshall Plan, and the Democrats soon picked up on that language, but without the substance of what we are saying. Their vision is tepid and unlikely to produce mass support precisely because it offers too little (lots of money, but concentrated only in one area). So let us state it again.

The Domestic Marshall Plan must address not only the problems of New Orleans, but also the problems facing America that have been revealed through the Katrina disaster. This must have three foci:

1. The permanent elimination of poverty in the United States. This can be accomplished by:

A massive housing program to provide adequate housing for every person living in this country, citizen or not. End homelessness and replace shabby ghetto housing with well-constructed, ecologically sound apartments constructed in central cities or in areas close to potential employment.
Guaranteed full employment through massive construction work and other socially necessary programs funded through federal taxes.
A national single-payer health plan providing universal coverage for everyone residing in the United State.
2. A total environmental transformation. In order to make it sustainable, we must rethink how we organize our society and must begin to repair the damage being done to the earth. This can be accomplished by:

Ending our reliance on fossil fuel. This means immediately requiring that cars produced in this country be hybrid, and that that they be entirely free of dependence on oil, or other destructive fuels within a specific number of years. Similarly, the production of energy for our factories and residences must be converted to environmentally safe forms, and this conversion must be completed without constraints imposed by those with investments in oil, gas, and coal. Meanwhile, we must adopt and enforce emission standards stricter than those in the Kyoto Accord.
Retooling factories to produce in environmentally sustainable ways.
Developing a global labeling of products that have been produced in a manner that is ethically appropriate (in terms of the conditions under which workers produced and delivered them to market) and ecologically sensitive—and then committing the U.S. government to only buying goods with such a label, plus encouraging American consumers to do likewise with an ad campaign similar to those used to discourage smoking.

3. A massive retooling of the infrastructure of our cities, including bridges, levees, ports, and all other parts of the infrastructure that might fail in a natural disaster.

What does this have to do with New Orleans? Everything.

It is precisely because we didn't take these steps that we faced the New Orleans tragedy, and it is only if we take these steps that such events can be averted in the future. And the tragedy is not just for us, but for the entire earth. We are not talking about fifty or seventy years from now. The global crisis predicted years ago when the Republicans, along with many Democratic colleagues, buried their heads in the sand is now upon us. It will get worse. New Orleans is but one dramatic manifestation.

However, there is one beautiful thing that sometimes happens during these kind of emergencies: the cynical realism that teaches us that people only care about themselves—a teaching that makes most of us feel scared to be "too generous" or "too idealistic"—temporarily falls away, and people are allowed to be their most generous and loving selves. When the restraints are momentarily down, there is a huge outpouring of love, generosity, and kindness on the part of many Americans. People do things like advertise on the Craig's List online community that they are willing to take into their home a family that has been displaced by the floods. This kind of selflessness is something that people actually yearn to let out, but under ordinary circumstances fear to do so.

That goodness and generosity of spirit must be tapped now, before it recedes again, which is all the more reason why this country so badly needs a spiritual politics with a global vision.

Source Citation

Lerner, Michael. 2005. After the flood. Tikkun 20(6):9.