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# 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
(TXT) detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/A_Paradise_Built_in_Hell
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:
(TXT) Getting to the end of the world
(TXT) New Orleans medic
# Tags
(DIR) book
(DIR) community
(DIR) history
(DIR) non-fiction