Lessons from New Orleans' devastation

What have we learned from the Hurricane Katrina disaster? We know the death toll, measured conventionally, was a surprisingly low 1,300. At the same time, we have learned that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had arranged for 50,000 body bags in case the most pessimistic scenario came to pass.

A recent "American Experience" episode on PBS posed the stark question: What would the United States be without New Orleans?

Rather than probe the implications of nearly 300,000 displaced New Orleans citizens scattered around the South and the United States as a whole, the producers chose to examine how New Orleans grew to a position of prominence and the struggles between different racial, ethnic, business and political groups to influence and control that growth. This is a laudable objective and, as a student of history as well as the media, I found much of the two-hour program satisfying and, at times, even intriguing.

For example, cultural icon Louis Armstrong's homecoming being marred by the refusal of segregated hotels to admit him led the jazz trumpeter to vow never to return to his birthplace again. Mixing and separation, tolerance and racial animosity, sophistication and barbarity all coexisted much like the races did in a gumbo as muddy as the waters of the mighty Mississippi.

I spent the second half of my high-school years in New Orleans, marveling at the massive mystery of the place the way only an impressionable adolescent can. My father, Russell Stockard Sr., lived in New Orleans 45 years until Aug. 29, 2005. At age 80, he survived the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina by climbing into his attic and remaining there for two days alone before emerging to seek help. Joining his rescuers, he spent most of the next three days on a freeway overpass.

Father stranded by hurricane

While much has been made of the contradictions that Katrina's wind and water revealed — the social stratifications separating rich and poor, college-educated and high-schooled, healthy and sick — my father was still teaching college as an adjunct professor at the time of the disaster. Though he had plenty of time and options for evacuating before the storm struck, he ended up suffering the brunt of the disaster. He has since retreated to Baton Rouge, a city that has doubled in size due to Katrina evacuees choosing the shortest route to safety.

Like Louis Armstrong, my dad has vowed never to return to New Orleans. "They fooled me once. They won't fool me again," he says. This is not because of racial discrimination, but because of a haunting sense of insecurity. He watched 40 years of tropical storms and hurricanes come and go with scarcely an accumulation of ankle-deep water in front of his home. He taught three generations of students, and still found time for a second career in journalism and an avocation for service through his fraternity.

Now my dad, a member of Tom Brokaw's "greatest generation," a veteran and a survivor, will no longer share his experience, creativity and wisdom with younger generations. He readily admits that his social network has been ripped and that many of his associates are scattered around the region and the nation. Many other quiet contributors who once called the Crescent City their home are resigned to witness the prolonged agony of a unique population center.

While I cannot return to New Orleans to help directly, I have devised a solution of sorts. I am teaching a course I call "The Social Construction of Disaster: Media and Hurricane Katrina" at California Lutheran University. The point of the course is to underscore that the disaster we call Katrina was well under way a generation before the storm bulled over the floodwalls. The social inequality and disparities in education, income and health together whipped up a quiet storm whose eye stalled destructively over New Orleans.

The course draws on the wonderful efforts of undergraduates who, in some cases, have volunteered to help many survivors recover. My hope is that these students will understand how the structures of inequality and lack of social mobility have handcuffed New Orleans, despite its inimitable record of creativity in music and food and its attitude toward life. The media professionals need to keep their lenses trained on New Orleans, as the city offers hard lessons that not just college students, but our entire country, needs to learn.

— Russell Stockard Jr., Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Communication Department at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks.