The book we are reading for this week is called Zeitoun, written by Dave Eggers. Zeitoun is a new kind of genre, a nonfiction. Eggers use the character in the book, called Kathy Zeitoun as a special perspective to portray the natural disaster Hurricane Katrina as well as the post-Katrina time. Hurricane Katrina took place at New Orleans in 2005. However, same as another tragedy took place in America, 9/11, I don’t know anything about Hurricane Katrina until last week, when Dr.Luger showed a documentary about Katrina.  Because I feel so distant about Hurricane Katrina, I am not sure about the correctness about my opinion. However, the first thought appeared in mind was so similar to what I felt when I started reading Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and getting into those small stories in 9/11. However, racism should the main topic this time.

As a matter of fact, the documentary Dr. luger firstly showed us formed the primary ideas about Hurricane Katrina. After finishing the documentary, I kept thinking that would the government react the same if Hurricane Katrina Happened in a modern and white community? At the beginning, what I learnt from documentary is that Hurricane Katrina was not as destructive as I imagined. Some of the buildings in the documentary was still intact under the wind and rain. To be honest, apart from the flooding, Hurricane Katrina was not as devastating as a high level of earthquake. So why people paid so much attention on this tragedy after the Hurricane was over? Above all, these were my superficial ideas for the first few minutes of that documentary. Then, there were several interviews of some of the refugees. I discovered that, in the video, most of the refugees are black, which made me to think about the problem of racism and racial discrimination. This documentary showed numbers of moment that made me think that if the black has less privilege than the white while being evacuated and accepting governmental help after the disaster. The people who was waving their hands and asking for help on a floating wood brick, the people who was sitting in front of the hospital waiting for treatment and the people who has become homeless after the disaster were all black people. Actually, the delay of governmental help could be the biggest killer after the disaster, because there were so many people died due to starving, disease, dehydration and infection and all of those causes could have been avoided if the governmental support could arrived faster. Even though New Orleans is one of the cities with the highest population of black people, I still can not shake the thought that racism was one of the reason that government did’t provide immediate aid.

Back to those discussion about 9/11, I mentioned that me, as an example, was ignorant about what happened in 9/11 and the impact of 9/11 until several years after it took place, and I pointed out that people from other country don’t actually care about those tragedy happened in other nations unless there  is a direct impact. However, apart from racial discrimination, I think those discussion can also be applied of Hurricane Katrina. New Orleans is not a prosperous city in USA and some people believe that the poor had been abandoned by society long before the storm. Radically, USA would not care about the poor much because there would be only little loss even if the poor were entirely destroyed. What is more destructive than a disaster is indifference.