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And All They Will Call You Will Be Deportee, Refugee, Evacuee, Survivor, Displaced Person . . .September 08, 2005 In case anyone thought that words weren't important . . . ? Hour by hour the discussion about what to call those affected by Hurricane Katrina gets more complicated and more convoluted. I'm not immediately affected by the storm damage, so I have some leisure to consider the issues -- but I'm still confused. Hence the randomness of this blog. A few days from now maybe I'll be able to put the pieces together. If you do it sooner, let me know. First, the "this is an emergency, who cares about words in an emergency, get out there and chop wood, carry water!" faction. Plenty of people think words are luxuries and not worth considering when there's important work to be done. There are also plenty of people who don't like to think too much about words -- who don't like to think too much, period. Emergencies let them off the hook; therefore they will always be drumming up emergencies. Hurricane Katrina couldn't be prevented or mitigated, but how about the conditions along the Gulf Coast? How come you didn't notice? Maybe your attention was diverted by some other emergency? While you're trying to shut everyone up in the name of Hurricane Katrina, what disasters are a-brewing in your town? "Refugee" was my first choice. I'm taken aback by the negative associations that other USians have with the word. These seem to boil down to "USians by definition aren't refugees, and refugees by definition aren't USians." Wow. I very rarely feel anywhere close to in synch with my fellow citizens (en masse, I'm talking about; individually I respect and like a whole bunch of 'em), but at the moment I'm feeling positively extraterrestrial. On the other hand, there's a huge epiphany within grasp here, if only it didn't keep changing shape whenever I stretched my hand out to touch it. In order to believe in our manifest destiny, in order to believe that our way is best, we must believe that we are immune -- by definition -- to the trials and tribulations that the rest of humankind is occasionally subject to. Wow. Wow wow wow. Lily Tomlin's Trudy proposed that "Reality is just a collective hunch," and my hunch was that her hunch was right on the money, but this new hunch -- that my fellow USians deep down think they're immune to the synergistic catastrophe of natural disaster and bureaucratic negligence -- stretches my credulity to the popping point. I'm not sure what to make of Jesse Jackson's insinuation that use of the word "refugee" is racist. I'm feeling less than charitable, but hey, if the stampede declares that USians can't be refugees by virtue of their USianness, it makes perfect sense for Mr. Jackson to declare that African Americans are USians too, and not the kind of impoverished third world riffraff that go by the name of "refugee." "Survivor." Well, OK, in the sense that those who lived through it have managed to live through it. Whether they survive or not is another question. I was around when feminists fought to have the victims of rape and battering and other forms of male violence called "survivors" instead. The point wasn't hard to grasp: at the time, the mindset was "Once a victim, always a victim." First you're a victim, then you're a survivor: that works. The trouble with bypassing the victim stage altogether is that it becomes all too easy to forget that there was a perp -- a victimizer. In the case of Hurricane Katrina this probably seems unimportant, but if we're talking about a pattern of negligence by local, state, and federal governments, and if that pattern might, just might, have something to do with the class and color of the survivors? Before you can bring the perps to justice, you have to have a crime, and in order to have a crime, you have to have a victim. What I'm thinking about are the people in Billings, Montana, who, faced with antisemitic violence during the winter holidays, placed menorahs in their windows so the terrorists wouldn't know whose glass it was OK to shatter. Thomas Jefferson, himself impaled on the horns of slavery, said, "Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever." I don't believe in that god, but sometimes I'm tempted to ring him up and say, "Hey, God? Think it's time for another flood?"
If you Google on "Not in Our Town" you'll find some inspiring community efforts in the spirit of the people of Billings.
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