Who has it worse?

I found myself having an interesting conversation last night with a person, whom I will call Sally. We began discussing the record breaking flooding here in Washington State, flooding that severely impacted local farms and dairies in the Chehalis river valley. Several farms have lost almost all of their herds and now are owners of flood-soaked homes, destroyed equipment, and fields covered with a thick layer of rapidly hardening sludge.

I remarked that the destruction was very much like New Orleans, albeit on a much smaller and more dispersed scale. Sally countered that this event was so much worse for the farmers because they had something to lose, they actually had livelihoods. And, she added, it was worse because it was the middle of winter and so miserable to be without a home now.

The remark momentarily threw me off guard, but did not really surprise me. Sally vocalized an implicit empathy for people with whom she felt more of a commonality and which she was geographically closer. This can positive thing. Local communities are often in the best position to help survivors in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. A strong sense of empathy with ones neighbors, at the local and regional scale, has certainly contributed to the strong outpouring of supplies, offers of housing, and voluntary clean-up crews that have developed during and immediately after the Chehalis flooding. Locals and people with which one has a commonality may also give the most appropriate aid.

However, implicit in Sally's remarks was also the vocalization of stereotypes many have come to believe about New Orleanians. There is an implicit racism, an "othering" of Katrina survivors, that has shaped response.

The depth of this differentiated understanding of pain and loss is disturbing to say the least, and has resulted in significantly delayed recovery for low-income African-Americans in New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward. You can read more that in an article I wrote for the December issue of Disasters and in an editorial posted here.

What struck me most about Sally's remark was, firstly, the disturbing comparison of loss of cattle herds to the excruciating losses of over 1000 human beings. There is also unwarranted assumption that New Orleanians "didn't have anything to lose." The hardest hit Lower Ninth Ward was a neighborhood with high African-American homeowners (much higher than national averages) and many established small businesses. Residents had much to lose, including mortgage free homes and close-knit family networks of support. And even beyond the wrong assumption that "those" people in New Orleans were too poor and unemployed and marginalized to really lose anything valuable, is that really the criteria for empathy? Research has show that it is the poor that have the hardest time recovering to pre-disaster levels. When you have much to lose, you also have many resources by which to regain your losses. The whole conversation rather rattled me.

Its so easy to distance ones self from the experiences of people who do not look or act like us or may be in some distant place....whether that be on the other side of the world, the country or the proverbial train tracks.

I don't think its even logical to compare the destruction along the Gulf Coast and the drowning of New Orleans with flooding here in Washington State. The destruction of cattle herds and the destruction of the entire economy of a city are very different and the recovery trajectory will show this. But, on the other hand, at the individual scale, physical loss, depression and the economic struggle that set in after a disaster are very similar for the families and individuals that experience them. I wouldn't want to be in any of their shoes.