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07031 January 12, 2007
Left behind in New Orleans
Activist lawyer tells PHEWA the vulnerable everywhere must be better protected
by Jerry Van Marter
NEW ORLEANS - The devastation wrought on this city in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina 18 months ago was not a natural disaster, but rather the failure of society and its governments to care for its most vulnerable citizens, a local law professor and anti-poverty activist said yesterday (Jan. 11).
"We did this to ourselves," Bill Quigley, director of the law clinic and the Gillis Long Poverty Law Center at Loyola University here, told the opening gathering of about 500 at the 2007 social justice biennial conference sponsored by the Presbyterian Health, Education and Welfare Association (PHEWA). "We left 100,000 people behind."
The story by now is familiar. Surging water generated by Katrina caused five breaches in the levees protecting New Orleans from massive Lake Pontchartrain. The lake poured into the city until the water level on both sides of the levee was equal; as a result, 80 percent of New Orleans was at least five feet under water.
"If you could leave, you left," Quigley said. "If you had no way to leave, you were left behind."
And overwhelmingly, he added, those left behind were New Orleans' most vulnerable: children, the elderly, the disabled, renters and those too poor to afford a car - most of them African Americans.
"Who died?" Quigley queried. "Mostly the elderly, who didn't have anyone to help or any place to go and couldn't help themselves."
This is an indictment of failed human and governmental institutions, Quigley said, punctuating his talk with now-iconic photographs and mind-numbing statistics: 1 million people displaced; 200,000 homes destroyed or rendered inhabitable in Louisiana; nearly half the population of New Orleans gone from the city; 80 percent of the city's public housing still uninhabitable; half the city still without electricity; all of the city's public schools that were not flooded converted to charter schools, with 7,500 teachers laid off and the teachers union decertified; three-quarters of New Orleans' doctors have left. The list goes on and on.
And what's particularly sobering for all Americans, Quigley said, is that "every U.S. city - though it's more concentrated and easier to see in New Orleans - every city faces the reality that kids, single moms, the poor, the disabled, the elderly, African-Americans and renters don't count."
For the citizens of New Orleans, Quigley said hope lies in the Beatitudes "and in the people in the Beatitudes who were assured by Jesus and believed that God is with them blessing them.
"When those folk say God is on our side, who are we to say anything different?" he said. "They are fighting for the right to return and we have to stand in solidarity with them."
Participants in the PHEWA biennial are doing just that, said the Rev. Bob Brashear, a New York City pastor and PHEWA president. Speaking to the conference's biblical theme - "You shall be called the Repairer of the Breach, the Restorer of the Streets to live in" (Isa. 58:12) - Brashear said, "If we come only as spectators, we will return home wanting. If we take the lessons of New Orleans home with us and see our communities through a different lens, we will have accomplished our vision."
Participants were scheduled to take an extensive tour of the area today (Jan. 12), address a number of issues and ministry opportunities spawned by the Katrina disaster in Jan. 13 workshops, and spend the day Monday (Jan. 15) on various service projects around the city.
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