Crónica de una desgracia

Estas últimas semanas tuve mucha carga de trabajo, tanto que me desconecté de la realidad. No leí las noticias o tuve intensas conversaciones sobre temas sociales. Fue así como logré inadvertidamente estar desconectado sobre lo que sucedía en Nueva Orleans.

Días atrás recibí un correo titulado: "hello from the post-Katrina world". La única señal que me alertaba que las cosas estaban mal era el precio de la gasolina; sin embargo, fue en ese momento que me di cuenta que yo no había hecho la transición al mundo post-Katrina.

Hoy al leer una crónica sobre lo sucedido, no puedo más que compartir dos ideas que me parecieron interesantes. La primera es sobre la imagen de Estados Unidos en caos.

Day after day of images showed exhausted families and their crying children stepping around corpses while they begged: Where is the water? Where are the buses? They seemed helpless, powerless, at the mercy of forces far beyond their control. The lack of rapid response left people in the United States, and all over the world, wondering how an American city could look like Mogadishu or Port-au-Prince. The refugee crisis—a million people without homes, jobs, schools—hardly fit George W. Bush's vision of the American Colossus.

La segunda, la más desgarradora, es el círculo vicioso que generan este tipo de desgracias. Al leer no pude mas que evocar el libro "Ensayo sobre la ceguera" de José Saramago.

Those who were unable to leave New Orleans were told to go to the Superdome for safe haven from the storm. It quickly became the first circle of hell.

In the dark bathrooms, the walls and floor were smeared with feces. A black market grew up. Hot sellers were cigarettes (at $10 a pack) and antidiuretics, to enable people to go longer without peeing. The occasional gunshot rang out. A man fell or jumped from the upper deck onto the concrete below and died. In a dank bathroom, someone attacked a National Guardsman with a lead pipe and tried to steal his automatic weapon. In the scuffle, the Guardsman was shot in the leg. Crack vials were scattered around the floor. At least two rapes were reported, one of a child.

At the adjoining and equally squalid New Orleans Arena, people began putting plastic bags on their feet to walk through the pools of urine. And yet, in a scene from Hieronymus Bosch, a man named Samuel Thompson, 34, took out his violin and played Bach's famous lamentation, Sonata No. 1 in G minor. He told L.A. Times reporter Scott Gold, who witnessed the scene, "These people have nothing. I have a violin. And I should play for them. They should have something."

Life went on, barely. On Monday night, in a dark attic surrounded by floodwater, Waldrica Nathan, 19, gave birth to a baby boy.

Mientras tanto yo, me encontraba abrumado resolviendo problemas totalmente banales.

---

The Lost City

What Went Wrong: Devastating a swath of the South, Katrina plunged New Orleans into agony. The story of a storm—and a disastrously slow rescue.