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So far, I’ve held my tongue about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Everything that needed to be said was being said by others, so I didn’t really feel I had anything (other than sympathy) to add through this blog. However, I received the following eyewitness accounts (Word doc) from Ed Pavlic, a professor of English and Africana Studies at Union College, and thought they needed wider distribution. These accounts are consistent with other blogged reports found though Boing Boing, Jacob Appelbaum, Joel Johnson, GNN and others, which paint a very nasty picture of the realities on the ground DAYS after the hurricane hit.

It’s easy to dismiss these word of mouth reports, and accept the bleached and whitewashed pablum from mainstream media. Credibility is certainly an issue for these sources. Until there is just too much to ignore.

I have to admit, I didn’t want to read any of it. And maybe that’s why the clean version on CNN and others is the way it is. No conspiracy… just the reality that we don’t have the stomach for seeing the truth… that the real truth means lower ratings… it’s hard to sell Hummers and Tide when you’ve just heard about the actions of local police blocking people from crossing a bridge to exit NOLA… somehow that sort of story is more palatable when it happens somewhere else, but not when it’s US.

The same goes with the stories of heroism. It’s easy to paint the people in “authority”, like the National Guard, as heroes in this. But the real heroes are the everyday people who do what is necessary to help others, even placing others before themselves. We’ll hear some of those stories too on the media, because they are good copy, but only where the adversity is created by a nice neutral circumstance (flood waters), not where it shows the darker story of the situation (anarchy, racist martial law, etc).

A reckoning is coming. And I’m not just taking about sacking a bunch of FEMA guys for being inept, or drumming our some elected officials because they ignored numerous warnings that this disaster was coming. No, I’m talking about a far more personal reckoning, one that asks us to look at ourselves and the state of how we take care of each other, and how some of these atrocities can happen in this day and age in the United States.