Hurricane Katrina and "Anarchy"

“New Orleans descends into anarchy” the headlines declared following hurricane Katrina, but they missed the real news.  The media focused on the looting, carjacking, shootings and rapes, and characterized this as anarchy, but what they were calling anarchy was actually opportunism and disorderliness.  The important news in New Orleans was not that it “descended into anarchy”, but that it “ascended” into anarchy. 

What do I mean by this?  Anarchy indeed broke out in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, but, by definition, it was the voluntary association of individuals and groups who mobilized to offer assistance to the victims of the storm that were acting in an anarchic fashion.  The term anarchism has been perverted over time, it does not mean chaos and disorder; anarchy is simply the absence of government, anarchy is not necessarily the absence of decorum or organization.  Anarchism points to an ad hoc system of self-government, whereby free individuals organize themselves in ways that best promote the fulfillment of their ideals and the satisfaction of their needs.  This is the ideal prophesized by Jefferson

The government proved to be incompetent in the disaster relief for the victims of hurricane Katrina.  There were too many competing agendas by the local and federal agencies causing a form of paralysis.  This competition was less between the agencies, as it was the agencies in opposition to the will and needs of the victims.  The hurricane, with the failure of the dams, provided an opportunity for the government to do some social engineering and zoning modifications, with an eye towards changing the face of greater New Orleans.  This apparent agenda particularly affected the poor and disenfranchised, with the African American community the principal population affected.

Stepping in to fill the void, sometimes in opposition to the bureaucratic agenda, were many individuals and groups that felt a personal and social obligation to lend assistance to those in distress.  While the government was failing in a big government way, successes by private individuals and groups abounded. Individual citizens, church groups, and a new band of grassroots relief organizations stepped in to take up the slack.  Often rebuffing local bureaucracy and refusing government aid, most of these independent groups relied instead on small donations of money and supplies, along with a whole army of committed volunteers in the communities they serve.  Most of the entities who mobilized to help after the Katrina disaster would not, for the most part, consider themselves “anarchist”; nonetheless an accurate definition of the word, which speaks about the cooperative and voluntary association of individuals and groups as the principal mode of organizing society, puts them in this camp.

While some would surely intellectually accept that moniker, others would proudly proclaim their commitment to anarchism.  Common Ground and other organizations such as Emergency Communities, the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund, and Four Directions joined small church groups in the region to provide services where government and large aid organizations failed to meet the need. In this effort they would often ignored the authorities’ thoughtless pronouncements, finding ways to bring supplies through closed checkpoints, setting up in areas not approved by the government, breaking the rules when it made sense.  Joining in the effort to provide for the needs of the hurricane victims was a caravan of medics from the “Bay Area Radical Health Collective” as well as other activists that arrived in New Orleans to do their part, such as the Food Not Bombs groups that mobilized from all over the country to feed those displaced by Hurricane Katrina

Also on their own initiative, a multitude of celebrities stepped up to donate one million dollars each to help the Katrina effort, including The Rolling Stones, actor George Clooney, singer Celine Dion, actor Nicolas Cage, comedian Jerry Lewis, and Beyonce’s man rapper Jay-Z.   Then there was Shaquille O'Neal of the Miami Heat, with his wife Shaunie, who coordinated an effort to ship tractor-trailers full of relief supplies to Katrina's victims.  

Angelina Jolie upset at what she saw was not happening in New Orleans wrote to Congress and the White House asking for more disaster relief.  John Travolta, flew to Baton Rouge with his wife Kelly Preston, carrying food supplies and vaccines.  Singer Macy Gray visited a camp in Houston, Texas and handed out clothing and toiletries.  Oprah Winfrey abandoned her summer vacation to visit those affected by Hurricane Katrina.

There was also a legion of ordinary citizens like Gary Maclaughlin who bought a used school bus and filled it with diapers and other supplies and drove it to New Orleans, then picked up a number of evacuees from the airport and drove them to a rescue shelter in Louisiana.  

There was David Perez, chairman of Surge Global Energy, who decided to spend a quarter million dollars to charter a plane and purchase a planeload of relief supplies. Later, he evacuated 82 hurricane victims and flew them to San Diego where arrangements were being made to help them. Then a Fort Lauderdale attorney Herb Cohen assembled a team of four medical professionals from Orlando. The group traveled to Houston on a jet paid for by the Aero Toy Store to provide medical assistance to evacuees.

A legion of groups also spontaneously assembled in New Orleans’s to give aid, like the coworkers at Smith & Associates in Tampa, Florida, who collected $20,000 worth of supplies for Katrina's victims. They filled two trucks with diapers, baby food and formula.  A group of people from the small town of Union, South Carolina, drove to Atlanta to pick up five families left homeless by the hurricane, giving them a place to live, along with groceries and utilities for at least two months.  Employees of the Columbus, Georgia, Courtyard by Marriott pooled their room vouchers, which they earned as bonuses, to give an evacuated family a hotel room for about to weeks; other employees took up collections to buy shoes for the children of evacuees.

Church congregations helping hurricane victims are to numerous to mention, but here are a few. Two of the churches in Ashley County, Arkansas (Promise Land Missionary Baptist Church and Calvary Baptist Church) offered to house a total of 75 people.  St. Patrick's church in nearby Phoenix City, Alabama, served hurricane evacuees a Thanksgiving-style dinner for Labor Day. Several truckloads of tents, sleeping bags, bottles of drinking water, and five-gallon gas containers for Katrina's victims were sent to the Gulf Coast from the Latter Day Saints.

And, not to be left out was the nation's children, from preschoolers to teens, who found enterprising ways to raise funds for Katrina's victims.  Six-year-old Angelo Ward and his four siblings set up a lemonade stand in front of an supermarket and collected $735 in one weekend.  Ten-year-old Melissa McLean of Hollywood, Florida, raised more than $700 in two days selling lemonade at a street corner in her neighborhood. Six-year-old Thomas Caruso of Paramus, New Jersey, watched the news as a Katrina victim holding her baby cried for help. He decided to give the $200 he had saved for a new Nintendo game to the hurricane victims.  Ten pre-teens from Howard, Wisconsin, sold curbside Kool-Aid, freeze pops, and cookies and raised $60 for the Red Cross.

With the present disaster in Haiti, I revisited the media’s love affair with the term anarchy as a means of titillation in addressing that disaster.  The best the press could come up with were instances of sporadic violence and looting, which they were quick to call anarchy.   As for sporadic violence, I live in a city with a cop on just about every other corner and we experience sporadic violence regularly.

As for the so called looting, it was generally in the nature of salvaging abandoned property of owners who were either missing or dead, very little of the looting was of a criminal nature (this even with the prisons destroyed in the quake allowing three thousand inmates to escape).  The true anarchy in Haiti was exhibited by the grace and stoicism shown by the Haitian people, who, finding no immediate aid from the international community, used hammers and bare hands to rescue the trapped and to administer aid to the injured.

The Haitian people shared what little they had and bolstered each others spirits with song and dance; they coped with the situation the best they could in a country that was economically devastated before this natural disaster. 

Given the spontaneity and success of these grassroots mobilizations in both Katrina and now Haiti, I would say that anarchy is the natural state of society.  It is clear by now that government creates its own agenda over time and this agenda is often in conflict with society needs. At those times it is our obligation as members of society to step in and take back the reigns of sovereignty.  I predict that Katrina marks the beginning of a revolution of conscience that will continue to escalate as society deals with the failures of government. 

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