‘Deplorables’ and foes, all pull together
Houston shows its grit and grace amid historic flooding
As Hurricane/Tropical Storm Harvey delivered its catastrophic whacks to Texas this weekend, in particular the Gulf Coast stretch from Corpus Christi to Houston, I could not help but think of Hillary Clinton.
It was about a year ago that she made some incendiary remarks at a fundraiser in New York City.
The full quote went like this: “To just be grossly generalistic, you can put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it.” She went on to say some of the deplorables were “irredeemable” and “not America.”
In another, earlier interview with an Israeli TV station that got less attention but arguably illustrated this was no slip of the tongue but rather how she actually saw these Americans, Clinton used the same language and said, “So just eliminate them from your thinking, because we’ve always had an annoying prejudicial element within our politics.”
Well, by Clinton’s math, Texas must be crawling with deplorables.
Trump took 52.2 per cent of the vote and all 38 electoral college votes there. Republicans won just about every race going, from the railroad commission to all but one seat on the state board of education to the Supreme Court and Criminal Appeals Court.
Yet, damned if those wretched deplorables didn’t pull together when that hurricane, and the monstrous flooding that came with it, arrived: CNN was full of video of black people helping white and white helping black and Hispanic helping and being helped, all of them looking out for one another.
As Ron Nirenberg, the mayor of San Antonio, a city the hurricane narrowly missed and where many evacuees have headed, said of his city’s opening up of shelters, “No one will be turned away.”
In the first hours particularly but even now, these were citizens, civilians, volunteers, Texans helping Texans, as they like to say down there. Folks who had boats got them out and then went to save some lives. The grace and grit, of both helpers and helpees, was marked. No one seemed to be complaining. No one appeared to be looking for the government to come and rescue them, though in fact, this time the government (I mean that generalistically) was fast off the mark.
It was in stark contrast to what happened not far away in Louisiana, which appears to be next on Harvey’s hit list, when Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005.
Katrina was an unmitigated disaster, a natural one to be sure that was followed by a man-made one that was almost worse.
Still, more than a decade later, no one knows with any certainty how many people died (the lowest estimate is 986, the often used number is 1,833) as a result of Katrina. Most of the dead in New Orleans were poor and black and without cars; most of them were trapped in their homes, and drowned.
Those who survived, saved by friends and strangers from rooftops and the like, were herded to the New Orleans convention centre, where for five long and horrible days and nights, they suffered mightily without seeing a face from any government agency and without a shred of help.
Now, Texas isn’t out of the woods yet, of course, and conditions may deteriorate, and almost inevitably, there will be screw-ups.
At one point, every freeway in the Houston area was under water (which may explain why Houstonians weren’t advised to evacuate; the city lies so low its roads turn into bayous at such times, and ordering people to leave might have been a death sentence). So many homes have been flooded that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which was invisible in New Orleans, says upwards of 30,000 people are in need of shelter. Eighteen of the 54 counties affected by the hurricane or flooding have already met the criteria to be declared federal disaster areas.
But knock on wood, thus far Harvey has been better handled, certainly by FEMA, and less ruinous and lethal than Katrina.
And more important, after almost a year of relentlessly negative news out of the United States, at its centre always Trump and those who voted for him, it’s a reminder that not all Americans who voted for him are deplorables, racist xenophobes who want only to raise the Confederate flag and re-enact the Civil War and build a wall along the Mexican border.
Or, if they are, they’re also smart, remarkably self-sufficient and quick to help their fellow man, which counts for something.
(By the way, the San Antonio Mayor, Nirenberg, Monday announced he’d moved to the full council agenda a motion to relocate the statue of a Confederate soldier from a public park. The discussion there has been peaceful, and the mayor urged residents to continue “expressing their opinions openly without fear of intimidation …”)
IN THE FIRST HOURS PARTICULARLY BUT EVEN NOW, THESE WERE CITIZENS, CIVILIANS, VOLUNTEERS, TEXANS HELPING TEXANS, AS THEY LIKE TO SAY DOWN THERE. FOLKS WHO HAD BOATS GOT THEM OUT AND THEN WENT TO SAVE SOME LIVES. AT ONE POINT, EVERY FREEWAY IN THE HOUSTON AREA WAS UNDER WATER.