Zeitoun and the failures of FEMA

I have heard and read a few segments lately about societies disconnection from items they use and things that happen elsewhere, and they were able to encompass where my lack of understanding of Hurricane Katrina and FEMA stemmed from. One segment that I listened to on NPR was about how if an alien tired to discern what it is that humans do on a day to day basis from our current artwork including paintings, novels, ect. they would think that we fell in love, talked, and occasionally murdered people or tried to solve murders. The average adult works at least 40 hours a week, but you would never be able to tell in most artful representations. We are increasingly separating ourselves from our work, and from the products we use. For instance, if I had happened to live in the 1500's rather than now, I would probably be in France, and would be a commoner. I would have a connection with everything I used. My dad or husband would have built the house using lumber he got from Jack the local lumber mill owner who bought it from Fred and ect. The cheese I ate with my bread for dinner would have been made by me, as also the bread would have. Everyone would have a very real connection to every object they used or consumed because there would be a personal connection to who made it. It current times I wake up to my alarm on my cell phone, which obviously someone made at sometime because it was there job, but it is something I have never thought of. The phone was charged using electricity which someone works to produce, but I never think of it being produced, it always just seems like it is magically there. These observations lead to a connection with another article I read. In said article, the author discussed how in my post apocalyptic movies, people will still have working Ipods ect. and how unlikely this was. One of the movies that they mentioned was Zombieland. I have saw this movie and nothing in it really seemed out of ordinary until the article pointed it out. Everywhere the stars go, there is electricity. This is post zombie Apocalypse. As the author said, there must be some hard working zombies down at the power plant. Now all this that I mentioned so far leads to my main point. After Hurricane Katrina I knew that things in New Orleans was pretty bad, and that FEMA messed up somehow, but I didn't know how or what had really happened. The book Zeitoun opened my eyes to post hurricane Katrina New Orleans like the news was entirely unable to do. I was disconnected from the tragidy by great distance (I lived in Michigan at the time and only met like 1 person who was displaced from Katrina) and by lack of personal experience.

Zeitoun was quite an amazing book. It was another non-fiction novel chronicling the trials of an individual written by Dave Eggers and was quite similar to What is the What. It told the story of Zeitoun an immigrant from Syria who owned a contracting business in New Orleans, and his wife Kathy. Zeitoun was a very busy guy, so when everyone was leaving town for the storm he sent his wife and children, but stayed in the city. The first part of the book was what I expected. He was riding out the hurricane in his house, stuffing pillows in broken windows, finding trashcans to catch leaks, and when the flooding came, putting important things from downstairs upstairs. When the storm ended he took out his canoe and went about town rescuing people and feeding dogs. One day while at one of the rental properties he owned he and three other men were taken to a temporary prison without being given any reason or being allowed to have any phone calls. They were then transferred to a maximum security prison and held there with no phone calls. His wife Kathy thought he had died. Someone finally called her and let her no he was in prison, but when she tried to call the prison they had no record of him being there because he was from FEMA. A lawyer friend of the family was finally able to find him and have bail set, and it was set for $75,000 which was around 100 times higher than it would usually be for they crime they were trying to charge him with without evidence (looting). They used a property deed to get the money for bail and got Zeitoun out of prison, but he was in for over a month for no reason. Also the other three men he was with were also kept in prison for up to five months. These were all innocent men who weren't given any information about their arrest or given a call, or had bail set, and this was here in the U.S. It makes me feel sick that we could have such a failure in our government. FEMA also had another nice showing in the book when they dropped off a trailer for the Zeitouns to use during recovery and never gave them a key or hooked it up to electricity. Kathy called various times to try to get the key or get the trailer removed from the property when finally she had enough and had a journalist write a story about it in the paper, than someone was by to pick it up the very next day. I believe that everyone should read this book. It was incredibly eye opening.