By LARRY BRADSHAW and LORRIE BETH SLONSKY
Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky are Emergency Medical Services (EMS) workers who, after attending an EMS convention in New Orleans, were trapped in the city—first by Hurricane Katrina and then by a martial law cordon. Their account—first published in the newspaper Socialist Worker—of their efforts, along with hundreds of others, to evacuate, only to be turned back by armed police from Gretna, a town on the West Bank of the Mississippi just over the bridge from New Orleans, electrified everyone who read it. Here is Larry and Lorrie Beth’s response to Gretna’s political establishment’s defense of its actions.
WE ARE saddened that the politicians in Gretna voted to sanction and affirm sealing Gretna’s “borders” in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. We are the two paramedics who wrote about our encounter with the Gretna police while trying to evacuate New Orleans. Officers from your police department physically prohibited hundreds and thousands of us (tourists and New Orleanians) from walking across the Greater New Orleans Bridge in the days following Hurricane Katrina. Apparently our written account of that troubling encounter has circulated far and wide on the Internet, causing the town of Gretna a great deal of infamy.
That brings us to the purpose of this open letter. We never meant for our original report to become an “us v. Gretna” story. To a large extent, this is the way it has been portrayed by much of the media. To our knowledge, we have never met a resident of Gretna and you have never met us. If we had met under other circumstances, we would probably have hit it off quite well.
We want to cut through all the divisiveness and open up a dialogue and foster a more healthy one-on-one contact between us and the residents of Gretna. We would like to invite the good folks of Gretna to visit the beautiful city of San Francisco. We caution you to dress warmly as you have the better weather of our two cities. By the way, we welcome everyone regardless of your race, religion, ethnicity, sexual preference, or any other attributes. San Francisco is a city that celebrates diversity. Our invitation extends to almost everyone from Gretna (given the strident posture of your police chief and city council we think we will withhold the invitation to those individuals, for now). But for everyone else, the open invitation stands.
If while visiting San Francisco you get stuck or stranded in an earthquake, a very real possibility, please call upon us whether in our professional capacity as paramedics or as neighbors.
If we have a bottle of water and you are thirsty, we will be happy to share. If we have food and you do not, we would be glad to share it with you.
If our politicians start calling our city or county limits a “border” and say that you deserve less because you are an outsider, we will raise bloody hell with them. If any law enforcement official tries to stop you crossing one of our bridges when you are trying to get to safety, we will come and personally escort you across the bridge.
Why would we do this? Because that is what neighbors do. That is what people do for each other.
The politicians of Gretna seem to have a different philosophy. From various media reports we understand that Gretna’s city council has voted overwhelmingly to endorse the decisions and the actions of Gretna’s chief of police when he closed the bridge leading out of New Orleans.
We wonder if that also means the city council endorses the chief’s stated reasons for that closure, “We did not have the wherewithal to deal with these people. If we had opened the bridge, our city would have looked like New Orleans does now—looted, burned and pillaged (our emphasis).”
Does that mean the city council endorses Gretna’s officers shooting their weapons over the heads of desperate, despairing, and frightened tourists and residents of New Orleans?
Do the members of the city council endorse a Gretna officer using a shotgun to roust us out of our makeshift camp and chasing us off the Pontchartrain Freeway at gunpoint? We should note this unconscionable act occurred on the New Orleans side of the bridge, far from the jurisdiction of Gretna.
Do the councilors endorse the actions of a Gretna officer taking the meager food and water provisions of families with young children and loading them into the trunk of his patrol car?
We wonder which of the above behaviors the Gretna City Council voted to condone? We understand that many residents of Gretna are being asked to take a stand in support of their police chief. Before being compelled to do so, we would like to share with you another perspective.
Pillaging, looting, or burning Gretna was never our intent. In fact, we have to confess, we were not even aware of the existence of a town called Gretna. We only learned of your town when we tried to cross the bridge and were greeted with a line of armed Gretna police officers.
Our goal was simply to follow the directive of another law enforcement agency to “cross the Crescent City Connection and make your way to the evacuation buses.” When informed that no such buses existed on the other side of the Mississippi River, we politely requested permission to cross the bridge to continue our journey. We were denied the right to continue our exodus to safety.
On multiple occasions, Gretna Police Chief Lawson has argued that Gretna did not have food, water, or shelter for us, therefore it was in our best interests that he acted in closing the bridge. We did not ask, nor expect food, water, or shelter from your city, whose existence was not known to us.
Most of us were already without food, water, or shelter. That would continue to be the case no matter which side of the bridge we were on. If someone had offered us food, water, or shelter, it would have been appreciated, but again, it was not expected. All we asked of Gretna’s officers was the opportunity to extricate ourselves from the scene of a major disaster and to continue walking until we could find transport to safer ground. We could see that Highway 90 was the route relief organizations were using to come into New Orleans. It stood to reason that Highway 90 was also a viable exit from the city. We were prepared to walk as long and as far as need be.
You see, your chief of police, and we as paramedics, receive the same disaster preparedness training. We have sat in the same disaster lectures, read the same disaster briefings, and participated in very similar disaster drills. In any large mass casualty incident (MCI), the very first thing 911 responders, such as your chief of police and us, are taught is to move anyone who can walk out of the area. Before we treat anyone, and before we do anything else, we are supposed to direct anyone who can walk to get up and move to a safe area. This accomplishes several things. It moves the uninjured and those with minor injuries to a safe area, and allows us to focus on those remaining who have more serious injuries. Hiking out of New Orleans on Highway 90 was our attempt to move the uninjured, able-bodied people out of the way.
It seems your chief of police, along with chiefs from other surrounding suburban communities, forgot the first rule of triage in an MCI. Perhaps it was the fear and loathing of looters and pillagers that clouded the good chief’s mind and led him to forget his training?
That is OK. We all make mistakes. We certainly know the two of us have made our share of mistakes when working on the ambulance. The more chaotic and disorganized an emergency scene is, the greater the chance of making mistakes. It’s Murphy’s Law. However, when we err, we try to learn from our mistakes, not to extol them. Chief Lawson has asserted repeatedly that, given hindsight, he makes no apologies and he has no regrets. If presented with the same situation today, Chief Lawson says he would do the same all over again. This concerns us.
Your city council, by sanctioning the chief’s errors after the fact, reaffirms that wrong decision. It is one thing to err in the heat of the moment. It is another to stand by that mistake when we have all had a chance to calmly and clearly reflect on it afterward.
We worry that the politicians in Gretna are engaging in a language of division, discord, and of drawing lines. First, Gretna’s city limits become a “border” that must be “locked down.” Gretna politicians define themselves as “us” and the rest of us become “them.” Those of us on the bridge, because we come from elsewhere, are seen as different and less deserving simply because we did not have an official residence within the “borders” of Gretna.
We, the outsiders, hail from many locations including, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The overwhelming majority of those trying to flee to safety were New Orleanians. The situation for the New Orleanians among us was even more bizarre. You and they are residents of the same state, and are neighbors, most living within a few short miles of each other. Some of the excluded New Orleanians lived closer to Gretna than some Gretnans live to each other. Yet, politicians now classify these neighbors as foreign, alien, and as a threat. We believe this kind of thinking is poisonous.
How did neighbors suddenly become threatening outsiders? There are two competing explanations to account for this process. For Chief Lawson it was his fear of the “criminal element.” Those of us excluded say it had to do with race and class.
The mass of humanity trying to escape the disaster that engulfed New Orleans took on a different appearance depending on who was doing the looking. Those of us on the New Orleans side of the Mississippi River saw thousands of common ordinary folks trapped by poverty, a hurricane, and a bungled relief operation. We looked at ourselves and saw poor and working people, predominantly African Americans, sharing what little we had and doing our best to survive. We saw people like ourselves in this sea of humanness.
On the other side of the river, all Chief Lawson could see were criminals straining to loot, burn, and pillage. In many of his statements to the press, Chief Lawson conflates the predominately African American crowds with criminals.
But the chief is not the only person to suffer from such vision impairment. Former secretary of education, William Bennett, recently declared, “[if] you wanted to reduce crime…if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every Black baby in this country and your crime rate would go down.”
“The skin-color coding of villainy is an ancient practice,” notes author William Van Deburg. John Wideman warns us that in contemporary American society, “to be a man of color of a certain economic class and milieu is equivalent in the public eye to being a criminal.” Thus “criminal” has become the modern code word for racism and prejudice, taking its place alongside old stalwarts like “states rights,” “forced busing,” and “welfare mothers.”
By their own admission, Gretna’s politicians viewed their neighbors as threatening outsiders in search of loot or handouts. It seems the politicians of Gretna want us to be territorial, suspicious, and fearful of non-residents.
This view of the world scares us, partly because of the treatment we experienced during Hurricane Katrina. Because we have an address that fell outside of Gretna’s zip codes, we were denied basic human rights.
But it also scares us because it reminds us of what happens in places like Rwanda, or the former Yugoslavia.
In Rwanda, Hutu and Tutsi had lived side by side in peace for a generation. Both groups identified themselves as Rwandans. But the two were set against one another and neighbor turned on neighbor when local leaders began emphasizing differences, at the expense of a common humanity. The same occurred in the Balkans inside the former Yugoslavia, where multiple ethnic and religious communities lived side by side, and often intermarried. When the Yugoslavian economy began to falter, the former Communist Party bosses played the nationalist card and emphasized ethnic and religious difference. The Balkans degenerated into bloody chaos.
Now, of course, we are not comparing our adversity on the bridge to Gretna with the horrific genocide in Rwanda and the Balkans. Rather, it is the mentality of drawing borders and labeling neighbors as outsiders that is the common thread here. But it should be noted that the actions of Chief Lawson were not without human consequences. The thousands of New Orleanians who were trapped and confined to the small section of the city that was not under water were impacted by Chief Lawson’s decision. The most vulnerable, children, old people, and the ill, suffered dehydration, endured exposure, tasted hunger, and sat in disease-laden sewage and garbage for several days longer because Chief Lawson fretted over looters. One can only imagine the mental anguish and emotional turmoil so many families were forced to undergo when they were blocked by Chief Lawson from walking to safety.
When politicians, be they from Rwanda, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, or America engage in behavior and employ rhetoric that create borders, blame outsiders, and turn neighbor against neighbor, we shudder at the consequences.
That is why we would like to offer an antidote to the poisonous rhetoric of the politicians of Gretna and in its place foster a one-on-one contact between us and the good people who happen to live in Gretna.
What happened on the bridge to Gretna can serve as either a wake-up call or a warning of what is to come. There will be other Katrina-type events. Hurricanes are becoming more numerous and intense. New Orleans may face another category 4 or category 5 hurricane in the years to come. Next time, it may be Gretna’s levees that give way. In San Francisco, it is a question of when, not if, a large earthquake will strike. The episode on the bridge out of New Orleans offers San Franciscans, Gretnans, and all of us an opportunity to think how we would want to react in a similar situation.
We do not know which side of some imaginary political, racial, or ethnic line we will find ourselves when a disaster strikes.
You were on the right side of the line this time, but you could just as easily be on the wrong side, next time. If we allow borders to be drawn, there will always be a right and wrong place to be during a disaster. Is this the future we want?
We are all in this together. We are all global neighbors.
