You know, Gentle Reader, how there’s this whole thing where apologists for Our Only President and his aristocrats imply that the people who were still in New Orleans when Katrina hit were morons, and the response of Left Blogovia is that they were poor, and had no car, and there was no way for them to get out? Man, that’s bugging me. I mean, Left Blogovia is, more or less, right on that, at least that there were lots and lots of people who couldn’t get out. But it’s certainly true that there were lots of people who could have gotten out but chose to stay.
I’ve been meaning to write about this since reading Jaipur’s note, and reading Teresa Neilsen Hayden’s note from yesterday afternoon finally convinced me to take the time to gripe. Before I start griping, though, I’d like to reiterate that both Jaipur and Ms. Neilsen Hayden are essentially correct, and that there were certainly a lot of people who did not have a choice. To make any decisions or policy or even emotional response without knowing that is incredibly ignorant, deliberately ignorant. And both women write in response to a very real attack on the refugees’ character. I ain’t got no beef with them.
But look. Imagine, for a moment, that you live in or near New Orleans. You’re poor. Not dirt poor, but poor. You’ve got a couple of jobs, maybe you wash dishes or bus tables at one of those tourist restaurants at night, and in the day you water the Garden district. You’ve got a car, a beater but it runs. Well, mostly it runs. Maybe the air-conditioning doesn’t work, or maybe the brakes are a bit squidgy, but hell, you’ve got a car. You’d better have a car, because you’d better get to work on time, because your boss is a fucking dickhead who would rather fire you than pay you, and your ‘landscaping’ job goes to whoever gets there first. But you’re doing all right, and because you get paid in cash and don’t have to wait for the 31st for your check, you’ve even got maybe twenty bucks in your pocket.
There have been two or three evacuations recently, and nothing much happened. Maybe you evacuated for the first one. Went to stay in a motel in East Texas for a couple of days. That was fun. Cost you a couple of hundred bucks, once you count in gas and missed work. The kids were screaming all the way there, and all the way back, and one of them threw up in the back seat after you stopped at McDonald’s. Car still stinks. The second one, you stayed put. It was parade time, and you didn’t want to miss the tips. Plus, the oldest kid was old enough to go for the first time. So you stayed, and nothing much happened, and the parades were actually a lot of fun for the first time in years.
So when they announce the evacuation, and the weather service sounds like John of Padmos, well, you really have to think about it. For one thing, that shithead at the restaurant was saying he would fire anybody that didn’t come in to work, hurricane or no. You call around a few cousins, but everybody’s either gone away themselves, or has a house full, so it’ll be a motel again and you don’t want to spend that kind of money. Also, there’s three-quarters of a gallon of milk in the fridge. Last time the power went out, there wasn’t much in the fridge, and you just ate it empty, but this time you just went shopping and there’s forty dollars of cold stuff. You could leave it there, and hope that at least the frozen stuff will be OK, unless the storm really is big and the power goes out. There’s no way you can keep that stuff cold on a road trip. And now that you think about it, what if the car breaks down in East Texas?
You know, you finally get a few bucks together, get the damned credit card down from its limit, and you were thinking about buying—what, a new mattress for the bed? A window air-conditioner? A community college course on how to use a computer? Maybe a new used car? And now you’re going to blow the whole thing on some foolish evacuation because the weatherman says it’s the end of the world. Sure, you could go. I mean, it’s your choice. You’re not one of those grandmas or children, or even one of those saps with a car but no gasoline. Your tank’s half-full. You are one of the lucky ones.
What I’m saying is, it wasn’t necessarily an easy choice. Staying was the wrong choice, OK? I’m not saying that just because the storm turned out to be as bad as the weatherman said. Playing the odds, even behind the veil of ignorance, tells you that the right choice is to put the kids in the car and go. But there were people who chose to stay, and I understand that choice, even as a rational choice, and I sympathize with it, even though it was wrong. That’s aside from a whole set of other things that have nothing to do with rational decision-making: a fierce desire to protect your home (even if it’s rented), a machismo surrounding evacuations that has built up over the last few years, indolence (and I sympathize with indolence, too), mistrust of the government (that’s not even irrational, is it?) and therefore of the warnings, and an illusion of invincibility. And, you know, there’s got to be some sympathy even for the irrational people. Even for the people who got scared and got drunk and got brave and said they were staying, dammit, because they were just damn staying.
One side says that the people who stayed made a stupid choice, and therefore we don’t have to feel too bad about having killed them with our national negligence. The other side responds that the people who stayed had no choice at all, and therefore we must bear the responsibility for having killed them with our national negligence. The first argument disgusts me, not only because the second argument demolishes it, but because we bear the responsibility for having neglected the people who made the wrong choice. You know, the undeserving poor. The prodigals. The sinners. The assholes. Them. We don’t get a free pass for killing them. Their sin, or stupidity, or even just their reckoning up the odds the wrong way doesn’t let us off the hook. I wish that Left Blogovia would say that, that’s all.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.
I cannot imagine the hassle it would be if we had to evacuate here, even with all the advantages of having money and flexible jobs and family to go to and cars and no kids. Doing it without those advantages? Remind me never to live in a hurricane zone.
One of the nice things about growing up on Long Island was the absolute impossibility of evacuating. It made disaster planning much simpler — you knew people had to stay put.
Anyway, since I think of Tohu Bohu as part of the lefty blogocylinder/blogodiscus/blogohedron, thank you for saying what you said. The world does not work such that people get what they deserve or deserve what they get, and our obligations to the less fortunate are not dependent on their morality.
right, it isn’t that stubbornness or immorality go with poverty, it’s that stubbornness and immorality cause poverty, and that’s why there was no foul.
David,
Unfortunately, while stubbornness and immorality do often cause poverty, they don’t cause it in the same people who exhibit the stubbornness and immorality.
There’s some overlap, of course, but stubbornness and immorality on the part of a few rich and powerful people causes a hell of a lot more poverty than the stubbornness and immorality of even most of the poor would.
And there are more than a few rich and powerful people who are stubborn and immoral. We have more than a few in the administration.
Of course, the poor are no more likely to be stubborn and immoral than anyone else.
Unfortunately, while stubbornness and immorality do often cause poverty, they don’t cause it in the same people who exhibit the stubbornness and immorality.
OK, I’m stealing that and using it a bunch of times. Oh, and in case people miss this sort of thing, because tone of voice doesn’t come across on blogcomments, and because he’s actually terribly good at that deadpan thing anyway, david is much, much, much more likely to agree with what Mr. Sample said than what he said himself. ‘cos he’s that way.
Thanks,
-V.
on my tombstone it will read
“he was a straight shooter
afraid to pull the trigger
because the gun barrel
was on backwards”
Well, based on my guess as to which David this was, I figured his post was sarcasm rather than trolling.
But once I thought of it, I just had to use the “[u]nfortunately, while stubbornness and immorality do often cause poverty, they don’t cause it in the same people who exhibit the stubbornness and immorality” line.
No offense, I hope.
it was a really good line. actually i think you very successfully carried the “i’m making this because it’s funny to treat you as a troll” tone.
Back to the original subject (ish), i just read a note that some homeowners’ insurance companies are covering living expenses for their policyholders for up to 14 days, even if their houses weren’t damaged, were damaged by flooding, or are in unknown condition. This is because the evacuation was mandatory.
Of course, not all companies are covering this, and flood insurance (btw, i had no idea flood insurance was sold by the government rather than by private insurers) doesn’t cover it. But the latter is irrelevant to this particular game, which is: in case of a mandatory evacuation before an event of unknown severity, how do we maximize the number of people who (a) can afford to leave in the short term, whether or not the situation winds up being catastrophic, and (b) have the perception that they can afford to leave, and that it’s worthwhile for them to do so.
I’m a pro-government type, so i want to do this using rules and advertising. Insurance companies: have to have an explicitly stated policy about what kinds of living expenses they’ll cover, and maybe even those policies have to say that they’ll cover modest living expenses in case of a mandatory evacuation (on the grounds that people don’t think of this when they’re buying homeowners insurance. They do right now, but they’ll forget again). Then, when the government orders the evacuation, they advertise this: your homeowners’ insurance will pay for your hotel, just get the hell out of town.
Then you look at employers too: if there’s a mandatory evacuation, you can’t penalize your employees for leaving, unless you’ve registered them as critical somehow. Make it expensive to register critical employees, so everyone won’t do it, or compensate the employer (via some insurance of some sort) if his people evacuate, or something.
Basically, you want to maximize the extent to which the costs of evacuating are not borne by the people who makes the decision of whether or not to evacuate, because you want the decision of whether or not to evacuate a city to be made once by the government. Most importantly, in the case in which, after the mandatory evacuation, the hurricane disappears in a puff of logic, you want all of these costs to be the same, i.e. not borne by the individual citizen who either hops in his car or doesn’t.
This is getting long. Lemme talk about your actual point in a separate comment.
Your actual point is about victim-blaming, about the idea that choosing not to leave was a stupid decision, but that it’s not okay for us to shrug and say, “Well, he screwed up and therefore he died. His problem.”
So, there was a particular comment that i heard from someone in the immediate days after the storm. This was said in all seriousness, and was largely, in itself, responsible for my cynicism that Our Only President would be in any way called to task for his response, for which Chris chided me in these pages.
Paraphrasing the speaker: “I used to have more sympathy for the people still in the city, until i realised, it’s only about a 20-mile walk to get entirely outside the flooded areas. So if these people would just start walking, let’s say at 2 miles per hour, they could be safe in less than 12 hours. I’m just talking about the young, healthy people here. They need to stop waiting to be rescued — don’t they know there are people who actually need help here?”
So, i will acknowledge that “Chaos knows someone who has moronic opinions” may not really be compelling support for an argument in the mind of anyone who is not Chaos, and perhaps shouldn’t be even in the minds of people who are.
But my point is that people are unsympathetic to the argument that sometimes other people make wrong choices from which they need to be rescued, and that such rescue is the moral choice. The doctrine of individualism is that, were i in that situation, there would always be some useful action i could take. And it carries with it the immediate correlary that, if you are in that situation and fail to take a useful action, you must be less resourceful than i am.
It does not, of course, imply that death is an okay penalty for lack of resourcefulness. But it does bring along the mentality that people who are trapped by a situation are Not Like Me in a philosophically important way.
I’m not sure i have a point. Maybe i just wanted to tell that story on the internet because i still want to kick something every time i think about it. But, let’s try here: i think that the compelling point which your story illustrates is not that people who made the wrong choice still deserve aid, but that the set of people who didn’t have the practical ability to make the right choice is larger than the set of people who didn’t have cars.
The point you are trying to make is one with which i also agree. But i am dubious about the extra sympathy in the public sphere which is leftover for people who did have a choice, but were wrong, because the mental response is “Had i been there, i would have made enough right choices to get myself out of trouble.” I don’t think Left Blogovia has enough capital to raise sympathy for people like the one in your story, other than by painting them as People Who Really Didn’t Have A Choice.
well i guess… it’s understandable to prefer denying an obligation to admitting weakness. had the person who made a choice been rescued in a timely manner, the paternalistic observer might have been elated and sympathetic.
To the extent that Left Blogovia is attempting to win elections, I think you are right (unfortunately). But the other thing Left Blogovia is for, or should be for at any rate, is what we laughingly call playing to the base, or just kickin’ stuff around here on the left side of the pitch. And I think they—we?—tend to still fall into the trap of letting elections rule our thinking, and letting Republicans rule elections.
And as Michael was saying up at the top, I can very easily imagine myself staying in a hurricane, out of … inertia, or magical thinking, or stubbornness, or just stupidity. But then I think that the poor are Like Me in a lot of ways, and the very rich are Not. Perhaps that’s just my limosine liberal arrogance speaking…
Thanks,
-V.