This is what failed democracy looks like

Here is a picture of my living room on approximately September 30, 2005 about a month after the federal levee system failure, an event which is sometimes more conveniently referred to as Hurricane Katrina. This failure of such vital public infrastructure resulted in about 6 feet of water in my neighborhood and much more in some other New Orleans neighborhoods.



This is what happens when a group of people have more or less fallen asleep at the wheel. By this I am not necessarily referring to the government, for they seem to be quite awake as to what has been happening, at least in some sense of the word 'awake.' The retrenchment of public services (both physical infrastructure and social welfare) has been a proactive political agenda in the U.S. for many years beginning in the 1970s. Some people hoped for a moment that the Katrina levee failure might be a tipping point in American history, swinging the pendulum back to a time where public support of constituent needs would be valued. Instead, barely a word about the levee failure has been mentioned in the current presidential election rhetoric. The democratic candidates rejected New Orleans as the site of a political debate.

I show a film to my students called "This is What Democracy Looks Like." It is a documentary of the Seattle WTO protests of 1999. This historic event occurred due to the efforts of a broad based coalition of environmental activists, labor organizers, and other global justice advocates from around the world who came together to protest the neo-liberal globalization policies of the World Trade Organization. The WTO gives loans and subsidies to the governments of developing countries that essentially support global corporations and are contingent on the retrenchment of public infrastructure and social welfare supports to the people of the country. The results are often the loss of indigenous land, weakened worker protections and environmental devastation. These are the same policies that the U.S. uses against its own people.

And we, the hyper-consumers, continually distracted by our desires, seeminlgy forever weakened by new desires created by corporations, are indeed failing in our job to build our communities and hold our government accountable for their part. Many, like the Seattle activists, are resisting, but it certainly isn't enough. Our sham of a democracy, like the black mold that thrived in my house, can make a person gag on its foulness. When you open the door for the first time, and get a real look at it, and feel it in your bones, it can make you call up your partner on the phone and say, "It's far worse than we could ever have imagined."