The Lessons of Katrina
24 MB MP3
It’s been about a week since the waters of Lake Pontchartrain inundated the city. The levees have been patched up and the draining of New Orleans has begun. The refugees — now called evacuees — have been taken to twenty different states, with about a quarter million people in Texas alone. Baton Rouge has doubled and Cape Cod is geting ready for a few thousand of its own. Erstwhile Red Sox pitching ace Curt Schilling has stepped in: he’s paying for a family of nine to live in Boston for the next year.
It’s time for us to step back and think about the long-term reverberations of Katrina’s aftermath.
There is no shortage of questions for our guests — who have yet to be determined — and for you: What is the role of government in the context of a disaster on the scale of Katrina? What about private citizens and groups? Or faith-based initiatives? Are we on the cusp of a sea-change in terms of our civic expectations? Will “big government” become more of a wish than an epithet?
And then there are the indelible — and shameful — images that played around the clock on U.S. televisions and throughout the world — images that have immediately brought to the fore the beginning of a new dialogue about race and poverty. By that I mean that, if nothing else, the words “race” and “poverty” have acutally been mentioned recently in the news.
So the largest question, and the one that perhaps would demand a sooth-sayer as much as a truth-teller: If Katrina has changed the way you view race, or poverty, or the role of government in America, what — if anything — will change as a result of it?
Alan Wolfe
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Professor of Political Science and director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College.
Marion Orr
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Professor of Political Science at Brown University.
Author of Black Social Capital: The Politics of School Reform in Baltimore, 1986-1998 and The Politics of School Reform: Race, Politics, and the Challenge of Urban Education.
Grover Norquist
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President of Americans for Tax Reform.