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: LOC: HV553 .S59 tags: book,community,history,non-fiction title: A Paradise Built In Hell p.s. See also: Anna's posts about Hurricane Katrina: Getting to the end of the world New Orleans medic Tags ==== book community history non-fiction