The New New Deal: Learning the Lessons of Katrina
September 8, 2005

by Curtis Lang		print version
		print version (graphics)

Welcome to the September 7, 2005 edition of the Satya Center newsletter. Warm greetings from your Editor, Curtis Lang.

We are pleased to resume publication of our newsletters today with a special three-part edition, devoted to the spiritual, environmental, political, social and practical consequences of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of the city of New Orleans.

May you and your loved ones be happy, healthy, free from fear, and safe from all harm, and may you attain your highest spiritual goals during the last weeks of this summer season. Please open your hearts to the survivors and refugees of Hurricane Katrina. Donate generously to aid organizations. Meditate and send healing energy to the area.

I will publish a regular edition of our newsletter within a few days. In the meantime, visit our website to see several new articles on a variety of topics displayed on our homepage.

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The ancient mystery school traditions of the East and the West instruct us that we are each linked to people, places, ideas, and things with whom we have shared intense emotional experiences.

We all have powerful memories of key moments in our lives that create powerful bonds, for good or ill, not so easily broken in this life or the next.

A subtle web of energies connects us to family, lovers, friends, enemies, compatriots, business associates, neighbors, the town where we were born, the place we met the love of our lives, the place our children were born, all the places where we share our heart’s desire, where we fight and bleed and work and give of ourselves and our energies in a myriad of ways.

These connections constitute the karmic attachments through which flow the emotions, thoughts, desires, hopes and fears that fuel the scripts that we act out in our relationships in the theater of our lives. These relationships and these connections shape all the activities we avidly pursue from birth to death – and beyond.

We are attuned to the beings and places with whom we have these connections, our emotions flow out to them, and we are often aware of subtle changes in their life passages, even when we are far removed in space and time, just as a young mother remains attuned to the hopes and fears, needs and wants of a newborn infant in another room – even during sleep or when immersed in unrelated activities.

On Sunday night, August 30, I was meditating in my bedroom in Claverack, New York, located in the farming foothills nestled between the Hudson River and New England’s Berkshire Mountains.

I had not been watching the news, or reading newspapers for the last month or so, because my wife Jane and I had recently moved from the suburbs just north of New York city to a promising fixer-upper just a short walk down the road from a family of farmer friends we’ve known for more than a decade.

I had underestimated the time and money required to fix up the house we bought by about 100%, and we were falling behind our commitments to our healing practice and our Satya Center website. I had paid no more than a moment’s attention to reports about Hurricane Katrina, which had passed over the Florida Panhandle a few days earlier.

Suddenly, during my meditation, images began to appear unbidden of New Orleans under water. I was shocked. A huge rush of emotions overwhelmed me from head to toe. I began to see an internal montage of images, each one a container for intense emotions connected to the Big Easy.

I was born in New Orleans, but have not been there for many years, a native son now gone Yankee like so many others for generation after generation who have become self-selecting refugees looking for broader vistas, greater career opportunities, a more liberal political landscape and more tolerant racial relations.

My first memory is of aristocratic St. Charles Avenue, where my parents lived when I was born. I am jumping up and down on the street corner, dressed in a bunny suit, with long, soft fuzzy ears, and my hand is raised in supplication to a man dressed in golden robes, wearing a large crown. The man, whose face is so caked with sweat-stained make-up you can’t tell if he’s white or black, is tossing blue and gold necklaces to the crowd. He sees me! Our eyes lock, and I can recall zeroing in on the incoming necklace like a heat-seeking missile during an aerial firefight. I’m too young to yell, but all around me people are screaming, “T’row me sump’n, Mistuh!” I am in total bliss as I snatch the necklace from the sidewalk a few feet in front of the black iron fence that protects our house from the sea of humanity flowing up and down the Avenue.

I moved to Texas with my folks when I was only four, and grew up in Houston and Dallas, but compared to Texas, New Orleans seemed so sophisticated, so cosmopolitan, so rich in history. The siren song of world-famous N’Awlins culture -- Creole music, cuisine and architecture -- drew me back as a young man, with my first wife, to attend the University of New Orleans, an open admission school located right on Lake Ponchartrain, where I taught English to classrooms full of African American students looking for an escalator into the middle class, partied all night long five days a week, got the best grades in my cohort, and received a Master’s in English the same summer my marriage disintegrated. Can you say “intense emotional experiences”? Can you say “karmic attachments?”

I heard in meditation that night that New Orleans was about to be destroyed. I saw lines of people waiting for food and water, streets and parks submerged, dead bodies floating next to streetlights, and lines of gravestones. I heard that I should turn on the TV as soon as I finished meditating and tune in to CNN.

I did. I saw a picture on the screen of Hurricane Katrina on a path to New Orleans. I told Jane, “This is the big one. I heard in meditation that this is the end of the city – as I know it, anyway. When I lived in New Orleans, we all used to talk about how one day a hurricane would flood the city and everybody would die. When a hurricane hit, my friends all gathered for a big party, but the people who had lived there all their lives were serious about ‘the big one’.”

My heart sank and I felt nauseated. Jane said, “No, the storm won’t destroy the whole city. It’s going to veer off. There’s still hours to go before it hits.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just know what I heard.”

This story you are reading is my homage to the city of my birth, the city Esoteric astrologers call the muladhara chakra of America, the city that represents the primal instincts coiled at the base of the American spine, the city that care forgot, a Triple Scorpio city where the party never stops, where decadence reaches a level of refinement unthinkable in the rest of this Puritanical culture. A drowned city now being completely evacuated, a city in an area where one million American refugees have fled, a city inhabited by perhaps 10,000 remaining live residents and 25,000 new hungry ghosts, unburied, separated from their loved ones, where now, ten thousand uniformed soldiers are just beginning to get around to counting the dead.

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It’s been a week since Katrina swept inland, flooding New Orleans, and devastating much of the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Because New Orleans is a sinking city, born below sea level, because New Orleans has been abandoned by generations of policymakers in Washington, and because this disaster is the industrialized world’s first taste of the ecological disasters set to shape civilization in the 21^st century, it is vital to understand what has happened in the Crescent City. To do that, it’s necessary to scope out the Big Picture, to embrace a historical perspective, to think globally.

So far, engulfed in the flood of media imagery emanating from the drowned city, onlookers have been watching an epic movie through a soda straw. It’s hard to grasp the enormity of the present situation.

The latest buzz in the media would leave one wondering whether Americans have the will and the wallet and technical expertise to restore New Orleans as a habitable city at all.

The other day, the Deputy Sheriff of New Orleans said the city has been “completely destroyed”. On Thursday September 1, the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, Dennis Hastert, from the 14^th District of Illinois said, “It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed.” . . .Asked whether he supported allocating billions in federal aid and insurance to rebuild a city that lies below sea level, he replied, "I don't know. That doesn't make sense to me." [1]

Why would local officials or Washington leadership act as though New Orleans was a disposable city? What do they know that we don’t know?

Consider the following: The French Quarter appears to have been spared from destruction. That’s the good news. As of now, it looks like we will leave 10 feet of water polluted by sewage and industrial run-off from flooded petrochemical facilities in many neighborhoods in the city for two or three months. That’s the bad news. To say that many of the buildings in New Orleans are not designed for such an event, and that many are not structurally sound to begin with, is a vast understatement. Old, yes, questionable, yes. And possibly ready to collapse anyway.

The French Quarter, and much of New Orleans, is overrun with Formosan termites. The city spends $300 million a year to combat the damage the bugs cause to priceless architectural gems downtown by the Quarter and to modern McMansions uptown by the Lake. [2] The termites eat through plaster, plastic and asphalt to get at tasty wood tidbits. Environments such as French Quarter row houses, composed of dried timbers and moisture-retaining clays are heaven on Earth to Formosan termites. Ninety-nine percent of French Quarter buildings have suffered from the bugs’ relentless attacks. Thirty percent of the city’s live oaks and cypress trees are infested. Scientists say that eradication is not an option. [3] But the bugs do not limit themselves to older dwellings, they enjoy feeding in suburban Metairie as well as in the Quarter.

Nor should we be overly sanguine about the structural soundness of most homes built in the Twentieth Century. I have lived in several ranch houses, and visited numerous McMansions, and I would not bet heavily on their structural integrity after several water-logged months, steeped in human waste, the stench of death, and assorted toxic chemicals released from industrial sites surrounding the hapless metropolis.

According to an electrical engineer blogger in New Orleans, many of the city’s 30-40 foot skyscrapers “float” on pilings in deep mud that are held in place by sheer friction. [4] What will happen when that mud sits underwater for a couple months? Will the foundations of the buildings begin to erode? Will they lean? And if they lean, what then?

Meanwhile, roads are buckling, copper in the ground will erode, and apparently, there is a lot of copper in the ground in New Orleans, so the communication infrastructure will not fare well during this fall season. And of course, there’s the water system. Which is in a state of catastrophic failure. So given the problems that have already surfaced and the grave prognosis for the city’s recovery, it is appropriate to ask the question – Will New Orleans survive? In what form? And who will pay for rebuilding?

These are the questions the callous Mr. Hastert harbors top of mind, and soon they will be asked more openly and with more urgency by the nation’s imperious elites, who will clamor to see a cost-benefit analysis for the Big Easy’s resuscitation that emphasizes short-term benefits and minimizes cash outlay and long-term planning of any kind.

To begin to answer these questions, we must now turn to the history of New Orleans, and seek our answers to the political, social, environmental, economic, geo-strategic, and spiritual questions this disaster raises for us as individuals, as Americans, and as global citizens.

It’s a tough job, but it’s our duty, and perhaps a more important contribution to the relief effort and to the salvaging of our common cultural heritage than writing a check to the Red Cross. Because consciousness creates culture. Because without vision, the people perish. Now, above all, we need vision. A vision of how we arrived where we are today, and a vision for a sustainable future.