Living like a refugee

Sept. 8, 2005

Dear Julie,

Americans are accustomed to hearing people in the Third World described as refugees. They are people who leave their homes to escape war or starvation brought on by grinding drought.

We aren't used to the word applying to our own. Now it does.

Hundreds of thousands are refugees from the awesome power of Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans.

The scope of this tragedy overwhelms. We already know it's the greatest natural disaster in American history without possibly knowing its full dimension.

Hundreds of thousands of personal stories are occurring within this greater one. Family members and friends torn apart by the flood, one gone to Houston maybe never to return, another to the safety of Virginia. The chef just hired for her first job by a restaurant that will never reopen. The new mother whose husband, a New Orleans policeman, can count on not seeing his child for months.

Lives have been changed forever and in ways that are unknowable. Most of the structures -- job, school, neighborhood, friends -- that defined the lives of Gulf Coast residents are suddenly gone. They might be left with their family or maybe with just themselves.

Their sense of security has been taken away.

Refugees are beginning to trickle into other parts of the country. We must embrace them. Help them find clothes and food and jobs. New lives.

Hurricane Katrina has churned up many unresolved questions about the way we treat each other. Sudan, Rwanda, Israel, Kosovo. The history of refugees is the history of the world.

DC wants to close her office and go to New Orleans for a week to rescue dogs and cats. I might have convinced her that other people are already there or going there who are in the business of rescuing animals and ought to be the ones doing that. But all of us want to do something. That's important right now, not to sit around agonizing over whom to blame but to do something to help the people and critters who need us now.

Friday night at 7, seven American television networks will broadcast a commercial-free special called "Shelter from the Storm: A Concert for the Gulf Coast." People who are wondering what they can do will be given many opportunities to give money, the best currency of all in this situation.

Some people object to the use of the word refugee, as if it somehow demeans the people who fled the storm and its aftermath. Evacuees or victims are preferred.

But have they merely been evacuated? That hardly seems so. The New Orleans schools likely won't reopen for another year. Thousands of jobs have simply disappeared beneath the floodwaters.

Are they victims? Certainly it would be easy enough to see yourself as a victim if your life had been so undone. But the victimization occurred after Katrina blew off toward the East Coast. The response was so slow that many at ground zero wondered if anybody cared.

These are simply people seeking refuge from an unprecedented disaster. They offer the rest of us an opportunity to test our compassion.

At this point, fault doesn't matter. Great amends are to be made. Time to begin.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is managing editor of the Southeast Missouri.