Lewis is not in good shape. He is frail, in his eighties, has emphysema and takes a veritable mountain of pills every day. He shakes when he talks, and stares despondently into space most of the time.
Poor guy. Right.
Lewis also lives on Division Street in Biloxi, Miss. Since Hurricanes Katrina and Rita clobbered the Southern United States seven weeks ago, New Orleans has been attracting much of the national media's attention. There is a good chance you have never heard of Biloxi, population 55,000.
Over a quarter of the city's structures have been designated on-sight unsuitable for habitation. Probably another quarter will ultimately be condemned due to bacterial infestations, displaced foundations or extensive rotting. In that sense, Lewis was lucky. His home wasn't demolished by the hurricanes and escaped the worst of the flooding.
But that doesn't really mean anything. Like many of the houses along the Gulf Coast of Mexico, from the outside, Lewis' home looks fine. Step inside, though, and a stinking reality comes crashing in from all sides. Though the foundation kept the house four feet above ground, his house was still flooded with three feet of water. Lewis lives nearly a mile from the coast -- along the beach, Katrina surged water over 30 feet high, battering homes with 150 mile per hour winds for 12 hours straight. One of Biloxi's sanitation plants, located several blocks down Division Street, overflowed and spilled into the neighborhood. Lewis claims that until several days ago, he was still finding turds around his house.
Last Monday, I spent the afternoon helping local volunteers carry Lewis' moldy and stained possessions to the curb. Cabinets full of t-shirts, underwear, cigars and belt buckles. Mattresses, shoes, bras and cracked mirrors. Crumbling brown cardboard boxes of photos, decks of cards, and the countless other trinkets that you accumulate over eight decades of life. I was literally throwing his life away, removing the material possessions that he had gathered and stored while living in his house, the same house he was born in. Meanwhile, he sat nearby, smoking Marlboros, staring at his knees. At one point, Lewis volunteered the information that his brother had killed himself in one of the bedrooms. As I sifted through chests of homemade ammunition -- his brother was an avid gun collector -- I found a blood-spattered newspaper stuck to a box of .45 rounds.
For the people of Biloxi, reality doesn't just bite, it gnaws. Lewis is only one example. He still has his house, family friends to look after him, and some savings in the bank. Others have absolutely nothing. They eat because the Salvation Army provides three warm meals a day. They have a place to stay because the North Face donated hundreds of tents. They have hope because they have God.
Time and space warp. Boom. We live our lives here in Hanover. It is human nature to let the issues of daily life dominate the order of how we function and prioritize -- significant others, tests, papers and our immediate families always naturally set the order of routine. Consequently, we cannot possibly fathom, even with news, television and the internet, what is happening in Banda Aceh, in Kashmir, in the Sudan. In the southern part of our own country.
The hurricanes were like an anesthetized stabbing -- one large part of us is hemorrhaging. We are still whole, but we can't feel the pain. For me, this disaster is more than a call to arms. It is an obligation to the people of our nation. Regardless of race, creed, ethnicity or political bent, as people who call America home, it is our duty to react.
Dartmouth College, with the assistance of the Tucker Foundation, is providing an avenue to do just that. After spending a week in the affected area with Dean Stuart Lord, we are considering making a two-year commitment to the people of Biloxi.
The hurricanes have presented us with an opportunity to confront the incredible. This is an opportunity for our country to reevaluate how organizations, government, states and individuals should work together in the twenty-first century and beyond. This is an opportunity to see race and socioeconomic boundaries transcended by helping hands. This is an opportunity to stop the hemorrhaging. From all the Lewises in Biloxi staring at their walls -- are you willing?
