Almost Three Years After Katrina, Baton Rouge Residents Still Struggle

Via Susie, a heartbreaking piece in today's New York Times: Out of FEMA Park, Clinging to a Fraying Lifeline. Not only are the residents' situations being described absolutely wrenching, but the underlying yet insistent tone that the residents themselves are ultimately responsible is just infuriating, especially when there's this, tucked in the middle:

The Homeless Alliance and the Community Initiatives Foundation, directed by Sister Judith, are part of a small consortium of agencies that is trying to keep those ineligible for FEMA assistance from becoming the homeless. …No one is sure how many ineligible people there are, but what is certain is that their numbers far exceed expectations and many are mentally or physically disabled.

And forgive my insistence on bleeding-heart liberalism empathy, but I am a competent, confident, well-educated, abled, privileged person who has rented apartments, bought homes, managed various financial accounts, traveled internationally on her own, and had occasion to fill out enormous amounts of complicated government paperwork—and if I'd gone through what the residents in this story had gone through, I'm not remotely certain that I wouldn't be so paralyzingly depressed and generally discombobulated that, irrespective of my experience, I'd possibly be making decisions that didn't seem the wisest course of action to outsides, or in any way reflective of being a clever girl who could rightfully be expected to get with the program.

When you're already down, and you keep hitting roadblock after roadblock, even if they aren't incredibly difficult hurdles to manage, the psychological defeat can be overwhelming. Most adult humans know that. And it shouldn't be so difficult to imagine how much harder it is to navigate the constantly moving target that is bureaucratic clusterfucktastrophe of disaster relief when you haven't even laid your head on your own pillow, not really, for three bloody years.

It's just shitty to imply that anyone who'd been through the goddamned wringer the way these people have should be pulling themselves up by the bootstraps already, when they're probably using formaldehyde-soaked shoestrings for bootstraps in the first place, thanks to FEMA.