Crisis and Crisis Management in Hurricane Katrina: A Radical Critique -By Ben Grosscup

During crisis events, people often show their most compassionate and even heroic sides. In Hurricane Katrina's disruption of every day life, most people in New Orleans have done the best they can to help each other. While decried as “looting” by the officials of order and private property, reports have shown that people neglected by rescue authorities are in many cases taking from the ravaged city's stores and distributing the goods equitably among fellow desperate people. Under police threats of “shoot to kill,” make no mistake that these are heroic acts – not crimes.

But moments of chaos and desperation are also moments when the most repugnant aspects of society, which may otherwise be hidden by the obscuring dazzle of every day life's drudgery, come into stark relief. Reports unsurprisingly indicate that gangs in the hurricane-ravaged New Orleans are taking the opportunity of lawlessness in New Orleans to hoard everything in sight, including firearms. But these small groups operated long before the hurricane hit the heavily impoverished city. The brutal rapes and killings this anti-social minority has been perpetrating on the people of New Orleans could have been anticipated and planned for. Indeed, what is most prominently outrageous in this disaster is the powers' that be crass disregard and indifference to the immediate and long-term needs of the people that have been affected by this disaster, especially those left behind in New Orleans.

Stepping back from the horrid immediacies this situation presents, we can discern two intimately connected aspects of our social reality that bear upon the disaster: First, we see the present market-based social and economic order where each must fend for him or herself without any background assurance that society will help when in need.

Second, we see that the relationship of this social order with its natural environment is one of dangerous ecological imbalance. These two aspects of our social reality are intimately connected, and as this disaster reveals with horrifying clarity, they exacerbate each other's effects.