levees and injustice

Last night, I watched all four hours of Spike Lee's HBO documentary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts and while I followed and wrote about the government's reprehensible response to Hurricane Katrina last year, watching a detailed play by play of it all over again made me even angrier, even sadder and more ashamed of the US government than I've felt in a long time. Especially because a year after the devastation in Louisiana and Mississippi, people are still displaced, still mourning their lost loved ones, out of jobs, waiting in vain for help from FEMA, and I could go on and on and on.

One friend who watched along with me felt Lee's images of floating and rotting corpses might have been a bit of overkill. (I too have often found myself yelling at the screen of a Spike Lee joint "We get it Spike, okay. We get it!"). But in the case of Levees and the arguable spectacularity of the dead, clearly we don't get it! As another friend intoned while watching the film, no culture--industrialized or Third World--desecrates the dead in the way that national and local officials did in Louisiana. My breathing stopped when a son returned to New Orleans to not only find his home had been destroyed but also that his mother's corpse was still in the house that had been mistakenly marked absent of dead bodies. So clearly we don't get it!

Hopefully Levees will refocus our attention on the people of Mississippi and Louisiana and encourage us to act by writing letters, sending money, or doing whatever our hearts move us to do, and especially holding our government accountable for its complete disavowal of human life. I think the film is extremely important and anyone who can access it should see it. If we find Levees difficult to watch, think about how devastating it must have been to live through.