It is always refreshing to read conservative ideals being lauded in a liberal publication, and The Atlantic's interview with Federal Emergency Management Agency director Craig Fugate is no exception.
Staff writer David Graham sat down with Fugate to look back at why the Katrina response failed and discovered that during disasters or otherwise, "citizens can't just wait for the government to save them."
If one reads the interview carefully, it will be clear that though the conversation hinges on natural disasters and the government's response, the long-held conservative ideal of self-preservation of the citizen rises to the top in all its glory. The very ideal that keeps the control in the hands of the public, not sacrificed to a government savior.
Looking back over the Hurricane Katrina disaster, Fugate noted, "We had almost by default defined the public as a liability. We looked at them as, 'We must take care of them, because they’re victims.'" This led him to the logical conclusion that it is the citizen nurse, doctor, construction worker, all servants of the community who are more than willing to rise to the occasion and offer help well before the government, seeing that community as helpless victims, gets itself involved.
Fugate continued:
“Post-traumatic stress” was this huge thing we had created to describe what people are going through in disasters, and how disasters are so traumatizing and leave lifelong scars, but when you started reading the research, it said for most people that’s not what happens. Certain symptoms you go through are quite normal, and we should be normalizing that, not making it exceptional. The best way to reduce the long-term impact is to get people back in control.
Yet the response Fugate observed by the government during that event "was literally to take all the control away from them."
"As long as you use vocabulary like 'victims,' you’re going to treat the public like a liability and you have to take care of them," Fugate said.
The first responders, Fugate added, are not the lights and sirens, but citizens willing to act.
From the interview:
Graham: Were people doing this on their own? Was FEMA in the way?
Fugate: Yes. It was getting in the way—not FEMA physically all the time, but in the way we wrote our plans and the way we did our training. What we built was government-centered problem solving. Everything was built on what government was going to do because the expectation from the media and everyone else was, The government’s going to be in charge and if anything goes wrong, it’s the government’s fault, so therefore the government’s gotta fix everything. This is a kind of creepy thing I sometimes run into in the response community. It’s all about the person that’s doing the rescuing. It’s like … No! It’s all about the people we’re trying to help. If that makes you feel good, great. But the reason you’re doing it isn’t to feel good—it’s to address what they need, but also to empower them and give them control.
Fugate goes on to explain that this victim mentality has been allowed to fester in the minds of the public and the halls of the government for far too long. Many see his refocusing the image of the public as survivors as revolutionary and radical. But Fugate says the idea of a whole community response is anything but "innovative:"
The whole community and all this other nonsense that all these people think is new and radicalized, it's like, guys, this is pretty basic stuff. But it does force us into thinking about disasters where government-centered problem solving will fail when our communities need us the most.
