State Failure
And Human Solidarity
By Dan La Botz
07 September, 2005
Counterpunch
While
the United States government failed in New Orleans, people acted to
save themselves and each other. Once again, as so often in American
history, ordinary people provided us with an example and an alternative
to our existing system. Once again black people's solidarity provided
a model for us all.
Government failed
utterly. Homeland Security secured nothing. FEMA-the Federal Emergency
Management Administration-managed nothing. The President, finally tearing
himself away from his vacation, first dawdled and then dithered while
people died. Only after almost a week of tragedy, suffering and shame
did government being to respond.
But the people of
New Orleans, poor African American people mostly, didn't fail. They
gave us a model to live by. They helped each other. Ordinary men and
women carried children and the elderly to high ground, built camps in
the driest, most secure place, formed bands to forage for food and dry
clothing. The strong helped the weak, as all helped each other. They
also spoke out in righteous anger to the television cameras telling
the world that the government had, after long neglecting them, now deserted
them. They demanded to be treated with the dignity they deserved.
Not all were steadfast
it's true. Some behaved like our society taught them to behave: competed
for resources, beggared their neighbors, hoarded their wealth. But most,
the vast majority, stood together. The rejected competition and embraced
cooperation and collective action.
Suffering and Solidarity
Doctors and nurses
worked around the clock in exhaustion giving each other I.V.s to overcome
dehydration. Firemen fought fires in a city with all too much water,
but no water pressure. Public employees risked their lives fishing folks
from the water, picking survivors off the roofs, ferrying the stranded
to land. But mostly it was ordinary people, civilians, the common folk
at the bottom of our social heap who helped each other, and set us an
example of how society might work.
Their suffering
has moved some, their strength should move us all. On a corner near
my house-hundreds of miles up river from New Orleans-firemen on the
corner hold out their boots collecting money to help. Around the country
middle class people, working people and the poor have reached into their
pockets and put money in the boot. Trucks loaded with food and clothing
are rolling, convoys are heading South, volunteers are flying in, doctors
are on the way-and not because of government, but because of human cooperation.
Because of solidarity.
Rat Race or Human Race
What do we learn
from this experience? For at least the last 25 years we have been told
by government, media, the business departments of the universities,
and conservative churches that the only social value is competition,
that the only mechanism is the market, that the only role for society
is to stand aside and let the rat race go on. We have been told that
the only motives are selfish motives, the only interests are ego interests.
We were told it was all a rat race: business, politics, foreign affairs.
We have been told to believe that the biggest, fattest rat will be the
winner of the race where in the end rat eats rat.
New Orleans has
now shown us the alternative to the rat race that is the human race.
We have seen that selfish interests give way to common concerns, that
ego interests give way to collective action. Not selfishness but altruism
and heroism have been common. The human race, if it is really human-we
have learned through this experience if we did not know it before-lives
not by competition but by cooperation, lives not by the survival of
the fittest, but by making the society function so that all are fit
to survive.
The poor black people
of New Orleans, portrayed on FOX and CNN as pathetic beasts or savage
animals, stood forth as human beings with all the strength and self-respect
that makes us proud to be part of the race, the human race. The conservative
media interpreted the crisis in New Orleans as rat race America at its
worst. Those who were left behind were said to have stayed behind. Foraging
for food became looting. The righteous anger and rebellion of the human
spirit was portrayed as the dark mob on the verge of riot. But no rightward
spin could spin away the spirit of solidarity seen in New Orleans, no
report could cover up the face of people who were poor and courageous
in mutual support.
Finally the guard
and the army arrived, under orders to establish order, to evacuate the
city, to rescue the remaining people stranded in the sunken city. While
the government gave the order, guardsmen and soldiers acted as much
out of heartfelt sympathy as military duty. Here government, the military,
did not what it usually does, but what it might do in a good society,
one that created a structure to facilitate human sympathy and solidarity.
Government as it might be, not as it is.
New Orleans's poor
black people in their solidarity in this crisis have shown us an alternative
to the White House, to the Hill, to Wall Street, to Madison Avenue.
They have shown us that within our society, among its working people
and its poor lives another potential society with other ideals.
What this crisis
has made clear is that we need to get rid of the rat race to let the
human race thrive. We need new values, a new society, a new government.
New Orleans, flooded, burned and destroyed stands as a monument to the
failure of our government. The poor black people of New Orleans, thirsty,
hungry, tired, frustrated and angry, but helping each other to take
another step forward, show us the way.
Now, we need to
organize ourselves, as they did, we need to go forward too. We need
a movement with a radical vision built not on working within failed
system, but creating a new one. We'll help rebuild New Orleans, but
let's also rebuild our country not on the basis of competition, but
on the principle of solidarity.
Dan La Botz edits
Mexican Labor News and Analysis, and is the author of several books
on labor in Mexico, Indonesia, and the United States. He can be reached
at: [email protected]