Four years on, another September tragedy. This month our NeoVox student writers are addressing the theme of "the war on/of/in/about terror." Next month’s theme is "mother nature as Medea," which originally came about in relation to the tsunami disaster, but now will obviously also include Katrina. Though clearly very different events, 9/11 and Katrina have drawn some comparisons. One such comparison notes that following 9/11 there was a united sense of purpose in the US, whereas Katrina seems to have generated partisan opinions. As Jon Stewart noted in his regular montage of neo-con rhetoric, the President has accused his critics of playing the "blame game" at a time when we need to be focused on relief efforts.

Perhaps…though quite obviously the events of 9/11 were immediately followed by the "blame game" (which was not difficult since bin Laden took responsibilty). Our sense of unity–which I don’t believe was as complete as it was made out to be by government and media–was grounded on our ability to identify a scapegoat (albeit a culpable scapegoat), an outsider on whom we could direct our grief and anger. The hurricane offers us no such convenient figures. As such, we are forced to look at ourselves. And though the Washington neocons might downplay their critics as playing a game, they have not been reluctant to pass the blame and responsibility onto local and state officials. As such, not surprisingly, their protestations regarding the "blame game" are undone by their own spin.

It seems to me that the bottom line is that thousands of people have died. Many of those deaths, while unfortunate, were likely unavoidable. We are not gods, despite our technological hubris, and it was a storm unlike any we have seen before in this area. That said, those who died from the failure of the levees and those who died because relief efforts came to late, those deaths we must mourn as a result of social failures.

The point, at least from my perspective, is not so much to blame but to analyze these social failures. Much as with 9/11, we will be happy to identify a guilty party and punish that party without recognizing our own roles in the way these catastrophes unfolded. This isn’t an issue of blaming the victims, of holding the dead of 9/11 responsible for their own deaths or of blaming the dead in New Orleans for not heeding evacuation calls or whatever. When I write our roles, I mean the rest of us.

How many of these, mostly poor, victims of Katrina were already drowning in our society? How many more will drown in their struggles as refugees, as the evacuees are now being called? How many others around our country are drowning under similar circumstances? How many other people in America live under such risky conditions with limited resources with similar vulnerabilities? Certainly category four hurricances that kill thousands are (hopefully) a once in a generation experience, but there are smaller, metaphorical storms that destroy hundreds of lives everyday across this nation.

This is the point I think many are trying to make in what is being called the blame game. Sure some are trying to take political advantage, just as the neocon’s made political advantage out of the tragedy of 9/11. That’s partisan politics in this country; both sides do it. But if we can set aside this gesturing for a moment, perhaps we can see what this event tells us about the underlying structure of our society and the way our priorities and ideologies shape the unfolding of lived, material experience.

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