In other news, the Newseum was incredible. I was crying about three minutes into the Pulitzer Prize winning photos, crying again by halfway through the informational 9/11 video and crying in anger at the cavalier Katrina exhibit. Although not part of the "Y'all Should Check These Out" list, the Pulitzer prize winning photos caught most of our UC's attention pretty early. I happen to think it was half because it was so close to the door and half because of the deceivingly cheerful photo in the Newseum map.
Come to the exhibit and look at all the smiling children! -.-
As with the rest of the Newseum, this instant of joy captured forever was a rare find in this exhibit. Speaking of the rest of the museum, I apologize for any toes I step on as I continue this reflection. It's just my response to the exhibits we saw.
The 9-11 exhibit was breathtaking. Seeing that wall of panic, remembering my 4th-grade-mind fearing the worst for my aunt who lived and worked in NYC (which, as a fourth grader, was of course about the size of my hometown and was all coming down in ashes. I had no concept of geography, and therefore, no concept of her, or my own, safety by lack of proximity) I was hit with wave after wave of deja vu as I saw replayed in the video the same footage that I watched 8 years ago on my couch. I lived in Massachusetts at the time, and moved to New Jersey soon after, and knew so many men and women who would rush to the big apple in the next months to help salvage, clean, and repair ground zero. I also knew many families who would, after days or weeks of panic and worry, eventually learn their loved one would never come home. I had a friend named Ashley Reardon whose father, a fire fighter, lied about his medical history to go help recover survivors and remains the day after the attack, and who subsequently died of a returning lung cancer in the years to follow. He wasn't alone. Our nations, most importantly, our citizens, response to the attacks on 9-11 was nothing less than admirable and amazing. In a time of need, we rushed to our televisions and responded in the best ways we could find amidst the panic. 403 paramedics, firefighters, NYPD officers, and port authority officers lost their lives as a result of their response. It was a calamity and we all knew it.
In comparison, with all this in mind I went up to the Hurricane Katrina exhibit and found myself ill at ease. I wanted to group it mentally with 9-11. I wanted to leave both exhibits with them resting as one terrible entity that I had learned about and learned about our responses to. After all, they were both horrific upheavals of life as we knew it. But instead I found I was pitting them against each other, and left feeling like 9-11 had won some appalling prize for being the more recognized legitimate disaster. Katrina demonstrated the same newspaper-laden wall, except I didn't see words like "Apocalypse!" or "Panic!". There was no mention of "evil" or "nightmare". The exhibit didn't seem centralized on the victims; it felt centralized on the media patting itself on the back for covering it. A quote found in the exhibit from Charles Overby, a Newseum Chief Executive, spelled this sub-plot out by saying "the government was slow to respond, but the media wasn't."
I'm not saying journalists don't deserve that pat on the back. I'm not saying they didn't risk a lot to cover a hazardous situation. But declaring that the government was "SLOW TO RESPOND" is such a ridiculous and lethal understatement that it cannot go without criticism. The news may have been getting out, but who was listening? Or rather, who was listening that could help? The numbers from 9-11 have been gathered, analyzed, separated and displayed in an un-ignorable fashion that serves to both educate and console the public. "Yes, this happened, and we remember every person who was or wasn't found, who did or didn't die, and everyone who was affected" they say to the masses. Whereas numbers on Katrina are near impossible to garner, because identification and recovery efforts were not only laboriously slow, but also stopped before completion, and are yet (five years later!) incomplete and insufficient to the vast numbers of "refugees" still seeking lost family.
(As an aside, the reference to the victims of hurricane katrina as refugees was one of the most massive faux pas I have ever personally witnessed. But that's another argument for another time.)
In short, the vast disparities in how the events were presented was saddening and a shame at best, but did serve to mirror our reaction to them as a country and a people.
No comments:
Post a Comment