inconvenient truths one year post katrina

every week my partner and i go on a date and this week, we opted for the obvious...dinner and a movie. my pick? something ridiculous and campy. my partner's pick? an inconvenient truth

i'll admit, i grew up caring nothing about recycling. and an entire childhood riding along with my three siblings in my parents' gas-guzzling, fuel-oh-so-inefficient, 8-seater, econoline van did not make me savvy about the ozone layer. and it wasn't just me. it became clear while growing up in a conservative christian household and attending a nondeminational private christian school that anyone interested in mythical global warming, reducing greenhouse gases and/or the thickening atmospheric layer was having a crisis of faith. for those people apparently did not believe that everything under (or because of) the sun was in god's plan for the earth.

i've been thinking a lot lately about the upcoming year anniversary of katrina's landfall in new orleans. beyond my politicized and humanitarian interests in the natural and unnatural disaster(s) of katrina, my interest in the hurricane focuses on its particular connection to southernness. as the broken levies moved images of the stranded poor and black of New Orleans from the invisible “dark matter” of this once tourist haven to the forefront of the national imagination, newscasters and their audiences could only process the unreal of their daily reality by displacing the long-standing poverty of the city from inside the nation to a more legible “third world” (a response that was not invoked in the aftermath of 9/11 since we could be certain that ground zero was/is still part of manhattan). as the unfolding horror and patriotic duty necessitated we leave the television tuned only to a 24 hour news station, the displacement was clear. “this does not look like the United States. it looks more like a third world country.” and when forced to admit this was the united states – albeit the southern half – patriotism dictated rage. “but these are Americans. we see them waving the flag from the roofs of their flooded houses.”

the incongruity of the televisual images of poverty uncovered by the harsh winds of katrina and the imagined idea(l) of what america “looks like,” reveals the contemporary othering done on the ideological and geographical place of the south.

but after seeing gore's film, i was forced to see my own role in literally creating the conditions of katrina. during the most poignant piece of the film, gore made the connection between the meteoric rise in CO2 over the past twenty years and its direct effect on the rise in catastrophic storms - including last year's record breaking hurricane season. so now i am immediately implicated in katrina - before the levies, before fema's failings, before bush's empty promises. and that above anything else makes me want to be more aware of my personal impact on the environment.