In the aftermath
of Hurricane Katrina, which blasted the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29, the entire world
has seen images that leave no doubt that what is repeatedly called the sole
remaining superpower can be reduced to squalor and chaos nearly as gruesome as
anything found in the Third World. The weather—a Category 4 hurricane—certainly
had something to do with it, but the most serious damage was done not by nature
but by man.
Much has been
and will be written about why the levees that are supposed to keep the water out
of below-sea-level New Orleans failed. There will be bitter recrimination about
whether the federal rescue effort could have been launched sooner. Commissions
will be set up to ask questions and lessons will no doubt be learned. But there
was another human failing that was far more ominous and intractable. No
commissions will be set up to study it, and official America will refuse to
learn any lessons from it. In the orgy of finger-pointing that is coming, it
will be all but forgotten. That human failing—vastly more significant than the
ones the commissions will investigate—is the barbaric behavior of the people of
New Orleans.
New Orleans is
67 percent black, and about half the blacks are poor. Of the city’s 480,000
people, all but an estimated 80 to 100 thousand left before the hurricane
struck. This meant that aside from patients in hospitals and eccentrics in the
French Quarter, most of the people who stayed behind were not just blacks, but
lower-class blacks without the means or foresight to leave.
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Looters make off with a trunk full of
beer. |
Katrina hit on
the morning of Monday, Aug. 29. Immediately after the winds died down, the first
reaction was one of relief. The hurricane had jogged east, and the city was
battered but still standing. Then the levees broke—apparently some time on
Tuesday—and the city began to flood. Before long, 80 percent of New Orleans was
under as much as 20 feet of water, and what had been only a storm became a
disaster.
The city’s
70,000-seat football stadium, known as the Superdome, had been officially
designated as a public shelter before the hurricane, and several thousand people
were already there the night before the storm. It had some food supplies, cots,
and medical supplies. But when the waters began to rise, people poured in from
all directions, swelling its numbers to an estimated 25,000.
People came
because their houses were under water, but also because New Orleans very quickly
collapsed in banditry. Looting began even while the storm was still blowing. At
first there was sympathetic clucking about the need for food and medicine, but
news clips of blacks wading happily through waist-deep water with television
sets over their heads dispelled that view.
The day after
the hurricane, a reporter caught the atmosphere of high-spirited chaos at a
Wal-Mart in the Lower Garden District. People were grabbing things as quickly as
they could, smashing open jewelry cabinets and scooping up double-handfuls. One
man packed his van so full of electronic equipment he could not close the rear
doors. A teenage girl passed out, face down, and people stepped on her. A man
stopped to roll her onto her back, and she vomited pink liquid. “This is f***ed
up,” he said, and rolled her back on her stomach. An NBC correspondent filmed
black, uniformed police strolling through the aisles, filling shopping carts.
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One of the few whites at the
Convention Center, with her 11-month-old baby
boy. |
At one store, a
police officer broke the glass on the DVD case so civilians would not cut
themselves trying to break it, but one man was ungrateful. “The police got all
the best stuff,” he said. “They’re crookeder than us.” One woman stocking up on
makeup was glad to see the officers. “It must be legal,” she said. “The police
are here taking stuff, too.”
Violence of all
kinds quickly spread through the paralyzed city, where robbery, rape and even
murder became routine. There were still thousands of people trapped on rooftops
and in attics, but on Sept. 1, Mayor Ray Nagin called the entire police force
off of rescue work and ordered it to secure the city. The response form the
force? An estimated 200 officers just walked off the job. “They indicated that
they had lost everything and didn’t feel that it was worth them going back to
take fire from looters and losing their lives,” explained Henry Whitehorn, chief
of the Louisiana State Police. Many disappeared without a word. Sheriff Harry
Lee of Jefferson Parish in New Orleans also said his men were deserting. “They
want to be with their families,” he said. “Well, I want to be with my family
too, but you don’t quit in the middle of a crisis.”
Two police
officers, including the department’s official spokesman Paul Accardo committed
suicide by shooting themselves in the head. The London Times estimated that one
in five officers refused to work, and some of those who stayed in uniform were
useless. When Debbie Durso, a tourist from Washington, Michigan, asked a
policeman for help he told her “Go to hell—it’s every man for himself.”
The collapse of
security made rescue and relief nearly impossible. “No one anticipated the
disintegration or the erosion of the civilian police force in New Orleans,”
explained Lieutenant General Steven Blum of the National Guard. He said the city
was operating on only one third of its pre-storm strength of 1,500 officers, and
that the guard had to switch from rescue to law enforcement: “And that’s when we
started flowing military police into the theater.”
New Orleans has
had only black mayors since 1978, and has spent decades making the police force
as black as possible. It established a city-residency requirement for officers
to keep suburban whites from applying for jobs, and lowered recruitment
standards so blacks could pass them. Katrina blew away any pretence that the
force was competent.
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Corpse left in front of the
Convention Center. |
(On September 5,
exactly a week after the hurricane, Mayor Ray Nagin offered to pay for the
entire police force, firefighters, and city emergency workers to go on five-day
vacations—with their families—to Las Vegas or some other destination. He said
there were enough National Guard in the city to maintain order, and that his men
“have been through a lot.” He brushed off suggestions that this was dereliction
of duty. He even asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to pay for
the vacations, but FEMA refused. “We haven’t turned over control of the city,” a
city spokesman explained. “We’re going to leave a skeleton force—about 20
percent of the department—for leadership and liaison with the troops while we
get some rest.”)
New Orleans has
a high crime rate at the best of times—it is usually in top contention for the
American city with the highest murder rate—and looted and stolen firearms
spilled into the street. Some blacks fired on any symbol of authority, blazing
away at rescue helicopters and Coast Guard vessels. Several days after the
hurricane, with desperate people still waving for help from rooftops, FEMA said
conditions were too dangerous to attempt rescues.
On Wednesday,
along one stretch of Highway 10, hundreds of volunteer firefighters, auxiliary
coastguards and citizens with small boats were anxious to reach people, but
could not set out because of sniper fire. “We are trying to do our job here but
we can’t if they are shooting at us,” explained Major Joey Broussard of the
Louisiana State Fisheries and Wildlife Division. “We don’t know who and we don’t
know why, but we don’t want to get in a situation of having to return fire out
there,” he said.
Perhaps the most
chilling accounts were from hospitals, where staff desperately tried to move
patients up stairs as the water rose, while blacks invaded and looted the floors
below. Most hospitals had emergency generators, but these began to fail or run
out of fuel. Two days after the hurricane, the city had no running water, and as
food ran out, doctors and nurses gave themselves intravenous feedings to keep
going.
Just outside New
Orleans, gunmen held up a supply truck carrying food, water, and medical
supplies that were on their way to a 203-bed hospital. Patients in hospitals all
across the city eventually had to be taken out, but rescuers met resistance.
Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Cheri Ben-Iesan told reporters at an emergency
headquarters: “Hospitals are trying to evacuate. At every one of them, there are
reports that as the helicopters come in people are shooting at them, saying,
‘You better come get my family.’ ” An effort to evacuate patients and staff from
Charity Hospital in downtown New Orleans was stopped by sniper fire. Other
hospitals reported gangs of looters attacking and overturning
ambulances.
Chris Lawrence,
a reporter with CNN, filed a report from the roof of a police station: “Right
now it’s the only safe place to be in the city. We were on the street earlier
but the police said under no circumstances would you be safe on the street. They
said anybody walking in the streets of New Orleans is basically taking their
life in their hands… . They directed some of the young women to get off the
street immediately.”
What may have
been the most shocking headline of the entire crisis was in the September 2
issue of Army Times: “Troops Begin Combat Operations in New Orleans.” The
article was about the Louisiana National Guard massing near the Superdome in
preparation for a citywide security mission. “This place is going to look like
Little Somalia,” Brig. Gen. Gary Jones explained. “We’re going to go out and
take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under
control.” The amphibious assault ship Bataan was in the area, but kept its
helicopters on board after pilots reported sniper fire.
Many soldiers
came under gunfire from civilians. “I never thought that as a National Guardsman
I would be shot at by other Americans,” said Philip Baccus of the 527th Engineer
Battalion. “And I never thought I’d have to carry a rifle when on a hurricane
relief mission. This is a disgrace.” Cliff Ferguson of the same battalion added:
“You have to think about whether it is worth risking your neck for someone who
will turn around and shoot at you. We didn’t come here to fight a war. We came
here to help.”
Michael Brown,
head of FEMA, said: “We are working under conditions of urban warfare.”
Lieutenant-General Steven Blum, of the National Guard, said the 7,000 guardsmen
arriving in Louisiana would be dedicated to restoring order to New Orleans. He
said half of them had just returned from overseas assignments and were “highly
proficient in the use of lethal force.” He promised to deal with thugs “in a
quick and efficient manner.”
Shoot-to-kill
orders were supposed to have gone out, and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco
boasted that battle-hardened veterans would put down the violence in no time.
However, there were few accounts of soldiers firing their weapons. The London
Times reported that a New Orleans policeman explained through tears that he had
seen bodies riddled with bullets, and one man with the top of his head shot off.
He said looters were armed with stolen AK-47 rifles, and that the police were
outgunned just like in Somalia. “It’s a war-zone, and they’re [the federal
government] not treating it like one,” he said.
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Hysterical woman in front of the
Convention Center. |
We will never
know the full extent of the mayhem blacks loosed on their own city. Many victims
will not be found for weeks or even months, rotted beyond recognition, their
killers never found. Drowned or murdered, the bloated, stinking bodies that turn
up by the hundreds will look much the same. In their haste to get cadavers off
the streets, the authorities may not worry much about cause of death.
From
Hurricane to Jungle
In the two main
refugee centers, however—the Superdome and the Convention Center—too many people
witnessed the degeneracy for it to be ignored. The first refugees had arrived at
the Superdome the day before the hurricane, on Sunday, August 28. The last
finally left the stadium on Saturday, Sept. 3, so some people may have spent
nearly a week in what, after the toilets began to overflow, became known as the
Sewerdome.
Preparation for
refugees was pitifully inadequate. By day, as many as 25,000 people sweltered in
temperatures that rose into the 100s. Whatever order had been established soon
melted away, and the stadium reverted to the jungle. Young men robbed and raped
with impunity. Occasional gunshots panicked the crowd. At least one man
committed suicide by sailing off a high deck and splattering onto the playing
field. Bodies of the murdered, and of infants and the elderly who died of heat
exhaustion began to accumulate. Six babies were born in the stadium. Charles
Womack, a 30-year-old roofer, said he saw one man beaten to death, and was,
himself beaten with a pipe. Crack addicts—who had brought their most valuable
possession with them—smoked openly and fought over drugs.
A group of about
30 British students were among the very small number of whites in the stadium,
where they spent four harrowing days. Jamie Trout, 22, an economics major, wrote
that the scene “was like something out of Lord of the Flies,” with “people
shouting racial abuse about us being white.” One night, word came that the power
was failing, and that there was only ten minutes’ worth of gas for the
generators. Zoe Smith, 21, from Hull, said they all feared for their lives: “All
us girls sat in the middle while the boys sat on the outside, with chairs as
protection,” she said. “We were absolutely terrified, the situation had
descended into chaos, people were very hostile and the living conditions were
horrendous.” She said that even during the day, “when we offered to help with
the cleaning, the locals gave us abuse.”
Mr. Trout said
the National Guard finally recognized how dangerous the threat was from
blacks, and moved the British under guard to the basketball area, which was
safer. “The army warned us to keep our bags close to us and to grip them tight,”
he said, as they were escorted out. Twenty-year-old Jane Wheeldon credited one
man in particular, Sgt. Garland Ogden, with getting the Britons safely out. “He
went against a lot of rules to get us moved,” she said.
|
Looters with bags of
clothing. |
Australian
tourists stuck in the Superdome had the same experience. Bud Hopes, a
32-year-old man from Kangaroo Point, Brisbane, took control and may have saved
many lives. As the stadium reverted to anarchy he realized whites were in
danger, and gathered tourists together for safety. “There were 65 of us
altogether so we were able to look after each other, especially the girls who
were being grabbed and threatened,” said Mr. Hopes. They organized escorts for
women who had to go to the toilet or for food, and set up a roster of men to
stand guard while others slept. “We sat through the night just watching each
other, not knowing if we would be alive in the morning,” Mr. Hopes said.
“Ninety-eight percent of the people around the world are good,” he said; “in
that place 98 per cent of the people were bad.”
John McNeil of
Coorparoo in Brisbane tells what happened to their group, too, heard the lights
were about to go out: “I looked at Bud [Hopes] and said, ‘That will be the end
of us.’ The gangs had already eyed us off. If the lights had gone out we would
have been in deep trouble. We were sitting there praying for a miracle and the
lights stayed on.” Mr. Hopes said the Australians owed their lives to a National
Guardsman who broke the rules and got whites out to a medical center past
seething crowds of blacks.
Peter McNeil of
Brisbane told the Australian AP that his son John was one of the 65 who managed
to get out. The blacks were reportedly so hostile “they would stab you as soon
as look at you.” “He’s never been so scared in his life,” explained Mr. McNeil.
“He just said they had to get out of the dark. Otherwise, another night, he
said, they would have been gone.” No American newspaper wrote about what these
white tourists had gone through.
When guardsmen
began to show up in force on Sept. 1 and take control, some blacks met them with
cheers, but others shouted obscenities at them. Capt. John Pollard of the Texas
Air National Guard said 20,000 people were in the dome when the evacuation
began, but thousands more appeared from surrounding areas when word got out that
there were buses leaving town. Soldiers held their M-16s and grenade-launchers
at the ready, and kept a sharp eye out for snipers.
That same day,
when it was time to board buses for Houston, soldiers had trouble controlling
the crowd. People at the back of the mob crushed the people in front against
barricades the soldiers put up to contain the crowd. Many people continued to
yell obscenities whenever they saw a patrol go by. Some were afraid of losing
their place in line and defecated where they stood. The Army Times reported that
Sgt. 1st Class Ron Dixon of the Oklahoma National Guard, who had recently come
home from Afghanistan, said he said he was struck by the fact Afghanis wanted to
help themselves, but that the people of New Orleans only wanted others to help
them.
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Refugees at the
Superdome. |
By the evening
of Sept. 3, the Superdome was finally evacuated, but the state-of-the-art
stadium was a reeking cavern of filth, human waste, and an unknown number of
corpses. It, too, had been looted of everything not bolted down. Janice
Singleton was working at the stadium when the storm hit. She said she was robbed
of everything she had, including her shoes. As for the building: “They tore that
dome apart,” she said sadly. “They tore it down. They taking everything out of
there they can take.”
If anything,
conditions were worse at the Convention Center. Although on high ground not far
from the stadium, it had not been designated as a shelter. It was, however,
beyond reach of the high water, and soon some 20,000 people were huddled in its
cavernous halls. There were no supplies or staff, and for several days neither
FEMA nor the National Guard seems to have known anyone was there.
Armed gangs took
control, and occasional gunshots caused panic. There was no power, and at night
the center was plunged into complete darkness. Degeneracy struck almost
immediately, with rapes, robbery, and murder. Terrible shrieking tore through
the night, but no one could see or dared to move. When Police Chief Eddie
Compass heard what was happening, he sent a squad of 88 officers to investigate.
They were overwhelmed by superior forces and retreated, leaving thousands to the
mercy of criminals.
It was not until
Sept. 2—four days after the hurricane—that a force of 1,000 National Guardsmen
finally took over from the armed gangs. “Had we gone in with a lesser force we
may have been challenged, innocents may have been caught in a fight between the
guard and military police and those who did not want to be processed or
apprehended,” explained Gen. Blum.
Sitting with her
daughter and other relatives, Trolkyn Joseph, 37, told a reporter that men had
wandered the center at night raping and murdering children. She said she found a
dead 14-year old girl at 5 a.m. on Friday morning, four hours after the girl
went missing. “She was raped for four hours until she was dead,” Miss Joseph
said through tears. “Another child, a seven-year old boy, was found raped and
murdered in the kitchen freezer last night.”
Africa
Brumfield, 32, explained that women were in particular fear: “There is rapes
going on here. Women cannot go to the bathroom without men. They are raping them
and slitting their throats.” Donald Anderson, 43, was at the convention center
with his wife who was six months pregnant: “We circled the chairs like wagons
because at night there are stampedes,” he said. “We had to survive.”
The very few
whites in the crowd were terrified. Eighty-year-old Selma Valenti, who was with
her husband, said blacks threatened to kill them on Thursday, Sept. 1. “They
hated us. Four young black men told us the buses were going to come last night
and pick up the elderly so they were going to kill us,” she said, sobbing.
Presumably, the blacks wanted to take their places on the buses.
The center was
not entirely without a form of rough justice. A National Guardsman reported that
a man who had raped and killed a young girl in the bathroom was caught by the
crowd—which beat him to death.
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Utility repair trucks on their way to
New Orleans. |
At one time
there were as many as seven or eight corpses in front of the center, some of
them with blood streaming from bullet wounds. Inside, there was an emergency
morgue, but a National Guardsman refused to let a Reuters photographer in to
take pictures. “We’re not letting anyone in there anymore,” he said. “If you
want to take pictures of dead bodies, go to Iraq.” By Saturday, Sept. 3, the
center was mostly cleared of the living. Refugees pulled shirts over their noses
trying to block out the smell as they walked past rotting bodies.
By the weekend,
there were an estimated 50,000 soldiers and federal rescue workers in the city,
but even the massive presence did not bring calm. On Sunday, Sept. 4,
contractors working for the US Army Corps of Engineers came under fire. Their
police escort returned fire, in what became a running gun battle. Deputy Police
Chief W.J. Riley said police killed four of the attackers.
By Saturday,
police had set up a temporary booking and detention center at the New Orleans
train station. State Attorney General Charles Foti said there were plans for a
temporary court system, but no one knew how they were going to assemble juries
or call witnesses. The grim business began of combing the drowning city for
corpses and the remaining survivors.
Reactions
The world
reacted with astonishment to sights it never expected to see in the United
States. “Anarchy in the USA,” read the headline in Britain’s best-selling
newspaper, The Sun. “Apocalypse Now,” said Handelsblatt in Germany. Mario de
Carvalho, a veteran Portuguese cameraman, who has covered the world’s trouble
spots, said he saw the bodies of babies and old people along the highways
leading out of New Orleans. “It’s a chaotic situation. It’s terrible. It’s a
situation we generally see in other countries, in the Third World,” he
said.
The comparison
would have been insulting to some Third-Worlders. “I am absolutely disgusted,”
said Sajeewa Chinthaka, 36, of the looters. The Sri Lanka native added: “After
the tsunami our people, even the ones who lost everything, wanted to help the
others who were suffering. Not a single tourist caught in the tsunami was
mugged. Now with all this happening in the U.S. we can easily see where the
civilized part of the world’s population is.”
In the United
States, the stark contrast between endless scenes of appalling behavior by
blacks and rescue personnel who were almost all white was greeted with the
standard foolishness. Some people accused the “biased” media of suppressing
footage of rampaging whites and heroic black helicopter pilots.
Most blacks made
excuses for looters. “Desperate people do desperate things,” said U.S. Rep.
Diane Watson of California. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., Democrat from Illinois, said
we must not judge harshly: “Who are we to say what law and order should be in
this unspeakable environment?” Rep. Melvin Watt, North Carolina Democrat and
chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, was perhaps the greatest ass of all:
“Whatever is being taken could not be used by anyone else anyway,” he said.
Many blacks took
it for granted that federal relief was slow because the victims were black. Rep.
Elijah Cummings said “poverty, age and skin color” determined who lived and who
died. Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP’s Washington bureau, blasted
“disparate treatment” of Katrina victims. “Many black people feel that their
race, their property conditions and their voting patterns have been a factor in
the response,” explained Jesse Jackson, Sr. He said the rubbish outside the
Convention Center made the place look “like the hull of a slave ship.” Black
activist and reparations-booster Randall Robinson said the relief effort was the
“defining watershed moment in America’s racial history.” He said he had “finally
come to see my country for what it really is. A monstrous fraud.”
U.S. Rep.
Carolyn Kilpatrick said she was “ashamed of America and … of our government.”
The mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, shouted and wept on local radio,
demanding of federal officials: “Get off your asses, and let’s do something,”
(and gave city workers a vacation when the feds arrived). There was an
undercurrent of fury at a meeting of black leaders in Detroit. One audience
member wanted to know whether the slow federal response was “black genocide.”
Another shouted, “African Americans built this nation. Descendants of slaves are
being allowed to die.”
One black man,
observing the chaos from abroad, took a different view. Leighton Levy wrote in
the Sept. 2 Jamaica Star: “I am beginning to believe that black people, no
matter where in the world they are, are cursed with a genetic predisposition to
steal, murder, and create mayhem.” He wanted to know why there was no footage of
white looters: “Is it that the media are not showing pictures of them looting
and robbing? Or is it that they are too busy trying to stay alive, waiting to be
rescued, and hiding from the blacks?”
Most blacks and
many whites fell into the usual assumptions about omnipotent white government
and helpless Negroes. If black people were suffering it was because whites had
not done enough for them. It did not occur to them that it was the
responsibility of New Orleans and the state of Louisiana—not the federal
government—to prepare for hurricanes. Before the storm hit, Mayor Nagin issued a
mandatory evacuation only under pressure from the Bush administration. The mayor
then did nothing to enforce the order, leaving hundreds of city buses and school
buses to drown rather than use them to offer transportation to people without
cars.
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New Orleans school buses that could
have been used for evacuation. |
Something of the
mood of black New Orleans was caught by Fox News film crews as late as Sunday,
Sept. 4. White volunteers were trying to persuade a black woman and her small
children to leave her flooded house. “You’ve got to get out,” they explained.
“The water isn’t going away.” A black man at the top of a multi-story building
told a helicopter crew he didn’t need to leave. All he needed was some supplies.
These people
could not understand something that was obvious to the whole world: New Orleans
had no electricity, no plumbing, no transport, and no food. Blacks refused to
leave their flooded homes, even though to stay meant near-certain
death.
Homeland
Security chief Michael Chertoff noted how crazy it was to stay in the wreckage.
“That is not a reasonable alternative,” he said. “We are not going to be able to
have people sitting in houses in the city of New Orleans for weeks and months
while we de-water and clean this city.”
FEMA reported
that it had pulled three Carnival Cruise Lines ships from commercial duty to
shelter the blacks of New Orleans. Maybe the chance of berth on the Ecstasy, the
Sensation or the Holiday would be enough to drag them out of the
muck.
Lessons
Ninety-nine
percent of the white people left New Orleans when the evacuation order went out.
Some 80,000 blacks could not or would not leave. Whites did not “leave them
behind,” as the editorial-writers keep telling us. No one could have gotten some
of them to leave, but if it was anyone’s job to give them the option, it was
that of the black-run city government. Of the blacks who stayed, probably only a
minority committed crimes, but they were enough to turn the city into a hell
hole. Some did unspeakable things: loot hospitals, fire on rescue teams, destroy
ambulances. No amount of excuse-making and finger-pointing can paper over
degeneracy like that. Black people—and only black people—did these
things.
|
Military helicopter drops
supplies. |
The Superdome
and the Convention Center were certainly unpleasant places to spend three or
four days, but 50,000 whites would have behaved completely differently. They
would have established rules, organized supplies, cared for the sick and dying.
They would have organized games for children. The papers would be full of
stories of selflessness and community spirit.
Natural
disasters usually bring out the best in people. They help neighbors and
strangers alike. For blacks—at least the lower-class blacks of New
Orleans—disaster was an excuse to loot, rob, rape and kill.
Our rulers and
media executives will try to turn the story of Hurricane Katrina into yet
another morality tale of downtrodden blacks and heartless whites, but pandering
of this kind fools fewer and fewer people. Many whites will realize—some for the
first time—that we have Africa in our midst, that utterly alien Africa of
road-side corpses, cruelty, and anarchy that they thought could never wash up on
our shores.
To be sure, the
story of Hurricane Katrina does have a moral for anyone not deliberately blind.
The races are different. Blacks and whites are different. When blacks are left
entirely to their own devices, Western Civilization—any kind of
civilization—disappears. And in a crisis, civilization disappears
overnight.