"A Gooey Mixture of Anger and Demoralization"
Jonathan Rauch files a depressing report from St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, a community completely wrecked by Katrina. Contrary to most disasters (the Northridge earthquake comes to mind), where TV footage often makes concentrated damage look widespread, here you never turn the corner and find the untouched area. Making matters worse are the many, many regulations written without true emergencies in mind. Jonathan writes:
Back in St. Bernard many people, presented with such arguments, will concede that every rule has its reasons. When a fire marshal told Voitier, the school superintendent, that she could not use an urgently needed mobile classroom because the doors were too close together, he was following a rule that may well make sense in normal times.
The trouble is that nothing -- not anything -- is normal in St. Bernard. The collective effect of all the rules and procedures has been to slow recovery in the early stages, when momentum was critical. Still more damaging, perhaps, is the psychological toll, a gooey mixture of anger and demoralization that drains energy and amplifies despair. It amounts to bureaucracy fatigue. Most welfare mothers know this feeling well, and many become used to it (or learn to game the system), but St. Bernard had always cherished its sense of independence. The parish was stunned by the hurricane, and then was stunned again to be pitched into a blizzard of pettifoggery, precisely when it felt too prostrate to cope.
"It just irritates my soul," says Joseph Di Fatta Jr., a parish council member. "There has to be a balance of the laws and the lives of the people. Right now, the emotional distress people are suffering is greater than the harm of inappropriately burying a can of spray paint."
Read the whole thing and the policy-oriented sidebar.