Imagine it’s nearly the end of the month, and payday is a couple of days away but you’ll be okay but you’ve got $40 or so left to get through the weekend and that’ll buy sandwich makings, chips, a couple packs of cigarettes and some cheap beer. Or maybe you got paid on Friday, so you’ve got $400 in your pocket, but rent’s due next Thursday and your workplace is closed the following Monday for Labor Day so you’re going to be short the week after because you’re hourly and you don’t get paid for holidays.
And then you hear they’re ordering evacuation because of a hurricane. You’ve heard this before, and you’ve never left, and there’s never been a bad hurricane, not for as long as you’ve lived there. It’ll rain a whole lot and the wind will blow real hard - assuming the hurricane even hits here, which you can’t assume, that’s how hurricanes are - and New Orleans has stood up to that time and again.
And the thing is, you can’t evacuate. The schedule’s not out yet, but you’ll probably have to work Sunday or Monday, and if you don’t work you’re not going to get paid. Also, you’ll get fired. Plus, the car’s been leaking oil for a couple of months - you drive around with a case of the cheap stuff in the trunk so you can add a quart before you leave work if you have to, and that piece of shit barely made it to Slidell for Aunt Mary’s birthday last month, there’s no way it’s making it to Lake Charles or Meridian where you’ve got cousins that could put you up. Even if it did, gas is nearly $3/gallon and the piece of shit goes through it like frat boys through a keg. If you try to leave with the car, it’s not going to come back, and then how are you going to get to work?
Or maybe you’re a nurse, or a doctor, or a cop, or a fireman, EMT, nursing home employee, lifeguard, or just current on your Red Cross certs, and you know that if things get bad you’re going to be needed. Maybe your mother’s got high blood pressure, diabetes, glaucoma, and edema in her legs, and it takes three hours just to get her out the door to go to the doctor and she sleeps for three days after you get home again, it’s so hard on her. Maybe your husband’s on oxygen for emphysema and if you leave town he’s going to run out and you’re not going to be able to get coverage for his tanks in another state, or his battery packs for the portable unit only hold two hours’ charge each anymore, and you’ve only got the two, and they’re already saying it’s going to take 5 hours just to get to Baton Rouge.
Maybe you’d be more than happy to leave, but you don’t have a car and Greyhound’s already stopped running and - you might find out later - the government couldn’t get its shit together to take Amtrak up on its offer. Maybe you’ve got a commercial driver’s license and you’ve been trying to call somebody all day offering to drive school busses to take people out, but nobody knows anything about that.
You probably don’t have the luxury of spending all day online - hell, you probably don’t have a computer at home or work in front of an internet-connected one at work - and while the Mayor is definitely saying you should go, you don’t fully understand how large this storm is because you haven’t seen anything of it.
Maybe you’re in a nursing home. Perhaps you’re a patient in the NICU, or the parent of one.
Well, apparently, if you didn’t pack up your late-model well-running vehicle and go check into a hotel - with your own food supplies, thank you very much - fuck you. It was a mandatory evactuation, you know, that’s why we made it patently clear that businesses would all be closed so you don’t have to worry about being at work Monday, and that’s why we packed up those preemies and the elderly and took them all to Houston, Dallas, Shreveport, Little Rock, and Memphis well ahead of the storm.
What’s that? Oh, well, if the old people and little babies had jobs they could have gotten out. It’s their own damn fault. It was a mandatory evacuation.
You know what could have saved maybe hundreds, or even thousands (if the death toll turns out to be as bad as I think it will) of lives? If the president of our country, who many people still look to as a voice of authority, could have interrupted his vacation for an hour to record a 2-minute PSA to be aired in Louisiana and Mississippi encouraging people to evacuate. He could have even gotten his daddy and Mr. Clinton to do it instead, or Brad Pitt or Dale Jr or some other face that people recognize and trust, just to say “you have to get to higher ground even if you can’t leave the city, you have to, it’s that important.” If we couldn’t be prepared months or years in advance, that much could have been done hours in advance.
You have to give people a recognizable sign of severity. Run the civic alert sirens until they wear out, sweep the city with fire truck and police cars, lights and sirens and PA announcements. Then, you have to actually provide people with the means to leave, but you have to convince them that they should in the first place.
And I will tell you something, and it either sounds perfectly reasonable or completely stupid, depending on your sentiments: if I had been in a situation where my only choices were evacuate and leave my animals behind, or stick it out with them, I would have some hard thinking to do. Everybody’s got some little story or image that sticks to them in a time like this, that puts a face on it. Mine is a little blurb on CNN.com about a little boy having his puppy yanked out of his arms as he boarded a bus to be taken who-knows-where (many evacuees were not told where their busses were going until they were already moving). The boy cried until he threw up. Staff at one of the hospitals, who had brought their pets with them as they hunkered down for the duration, were asking a doctor to put their animals down rather than turn them loose to suffer and die. And, you know what? People care about that kind of shit, yes, even in a crisis. Maybe especially in a crisis like this, where you have a relatively good chance that there’s going to be an After. Nobody wants to live in an After where they have to wonder, for the rest of their lives, whether their animals survived or how horrible their deaths might have been.
This is all a long way of saying that if you want people to leave, you have to help them leave, and you have to help them want to leave. You have to be able to get them out in the first place.
If we, as a country, are so unprepared for a hurricane we saw headed straight for a city below sea level, how prepared are we for an unexpected engineering failure or terrorist act on a dam, or another flood like the Mississippi in 1996? If you’re in an area that could be affected like that, you better go up to your attic and lay in an axe, food and water for a week, and a sheet or towel to wave at the helicopters if they show up, because it’s going to be your own damn fault if you drown in your own fucking attic. I guess you better make sure your attic is inhabitable in the first place; I don’t know about you, but mine is not finished in any way and if I had children I don’t know how I’d keep them from falling through the ceiling - I don’t know that there’s any way I could keep the dogs safe unless I kept a couple of Vari-Kennels supported on 2×4s at the ready up there.
I’m seeing now on CNN that the mayor has announced that people refusing to evacuate will not be given water. Because, you see, people suffering from dehydration are incredibly rational. Personally, I like to keep myself right at the edge of kidney failure because it keeps me good and sharp and I find my decision-making abilities are absolutely stellar in that state. I’m sure, under those circumstances, living on my roof and all after seeing my entire neighborhood devastated and the dead bodies and rolling balls of fire ants going by, if the National Guard floated by in a flat bottomed boat and asked me, “Do you want to get in this boat and drink some water, or do you want to stay on that roof?” my response would undoubtedly be “You have funny hats! I’ve got a monkey! Look out, here come the giant butterflies! Woot woot! ”
For the record, if I hadn’t had any of my usual crack, insulin, potassium, or, you know, food for a week, my answer would be the same. I stand by my woot woot.
But it’s comforting to know, in the midst of this enormous clusterfuck, that Trent Lott’s home will be rebuilt. Woot motherfucking woot.