When I Stopped Being a Republican

I can tell you almost the precise moment I stopped being a Republican. 

It was September of 2005, a few days after Hurricane Katrina had struck New Orleans and the surrounding region. The five days following the storm was one of the most harrowing times I can remember as we struggled to get my mother and aunt out of the city (both in their 80s, they had refused to leave because “we’ve been through this before”).

The state, local and federal governments were overwhelmed. News media seemed to be able to get in and out of the city with ease, while thousands of people were left at the Superdome, the convention center, their own homes. People were dying, and, as we later learned, the federal government (the Bush Administration) and the state government were fighting each other over who should control the relief effort. People were dying while Republicans and Democrats were arguing with each other.

I did what tens of thousands of others did. I took to the internet, to chat rooms, and web sites. I had to figure out how to get my mother and aunt out and find what had happened to my brother and sister-in-law, who lived north of Lake Pontchartrain. The New Orleans Times-Picayune set up discussion sites by neighborhood, and it was through these sites I was able to determine my brother was most likely okay.

And then a photograph was published – President Bush on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, his arm around a man who had survived the storm and lost everything. They were sitting atop a pile of rubble. There was no way the President just happened upon a man sitting atop a pile of rubble. The picture had been completely posed by someone in charge of White House photo opps.

I yelled at the newspaper. People were dying and all the White House cared about a photo opp for the President, to show he cared. Tell that to the elderly woman who died in her wheel chair outside the New Orleans Convention Center.

It took two weeks before the federal government finally intervened. In the meantime, ordinary people had taken their boats, and rangers with the Louisiana Department of Wildlife & Fisheries had taken their boats, and went into the city to rescue people from the tops of their houses. The people had to do what the federal and state governments had been unable to do.

Republicans might be uncaring, and they might walk in lockstep with CEOs, but they were supposed to be competent.

President Bush and the Republicans had lost me.

The next year, a book was published. David Kuo had been one of those young political writers who had been a policy advisor to John Ashcroft and a speechwriter for Ralph Reed, Pat Robertson, and Bob Dole. And then he reached the White House – what looked to be the pinnacle for a Christian in politics. He served as second in command in the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.

He lasted three years. And he saw and experienced exactly what the Republican establishment thought of Christians and how they used Christians and Christian leaders. And he saw how Christian leaders let themselves be used.

David Kuo

Kuo’s book is called Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Corruption. The media loved it because it embarrassed the Bush Administration specifically and Republicans in general. Few Christians read it.

I read the Wall street Journal editorial and op-ed pages as an antidote to what passes for editorial opinion at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. But after Kuo’s book, I cannot bring myself to read the Journal’s regular columns by Karl Rove, the man who referred to Christians with expletives.

It’s a book that is well worth reading and rereading, especially in this political year. Unintentionally, it explains part of the reason for Donald Trump. The establishment Republicans were never interested in what Christians were concerned about; they only said enough to keep getting those Christian votes. And now the piper is asking to be paid.

Kuo developed a brain tumor. For a time, it looked like he might make it. But he didn’t, and died in 2013. He had a blog called J Walking, published by Belief Net, which has been left intact but is no longer updated. Occasionally, I reread some of his posts.

I should say that I did not become a Democrat. Or a Libertarian. But my vote is no longer something the Republicans can count on. I don't put my faith in political parties. Or presidential candidates.

Photograph by Peter Griffin via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

This One's Political (Sort Of)

In our discussion of The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement by David Brooks over at The High Calling, our fictional characters Erica and Harold take a turn for the political – they get involved in a presidential election, working directly for a candidate (party unidentified but I would suspect Democratic). Brooks uses this to talk about our political inclinations and how we get them, and throws a lot of conventional wisdom out of the window.

I wonder what he would make of me.

The first time I was “legal” to vote was 1971. At that time in Louisiana, if you wanted to vote, you had to vote in the Democratic primary. The Republican Party existed in Louisiana and other Deep South states, but it was a non-starter in state politics from the end of Reconstruction in 1876 to the 1980s – a century of Democratic control.

For the most part, this “southern Democrat” translated as conservative. Then came the McGovern candidacy in 1972, and the changes engineered in the Democratic Party which turned out to be vastly more consequential than McGovern. What the changes had the effect of doing was to drive Southern conservative Democrats into the arms of the Republican Party.

For the next 30 years, and in three states – Louisiana, Texas and Missouri, I considered myself a Republican. I voted for Republicans at the national and state level, and usually if not always at the local level. My attitudes, perceptions and political beliefs were shaped and molded by essentially a Republican sensibility. I did feel an uneasiness with how the Republicans talked a good game on social and moral issues but never really initiated much. They seemed more adept at stopping or slowing, but not really willing to take on the major moral questions.

Two things happened that cut me adrift.

First, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 demonstrated the sheer incompetence of federal disaster authorities. People were dying in the streets of New Orleans, while the administration seemed more interested in making sure the President had just the right backdrop for a photo opp. I think the President truly cared, but his handlers were far more concerned with political appearances than with rescuing people.

This was my hometown, my family and friends, my heritage, and I was stunned by the ineptness of the government’s response. As columnist George Will pointed out at the time, whatever else you wanted to say about them, the Republicans were supposed to be competent. I joined the streams of tens of thousands who took to the internet to find out information, share information, and help people (I will admit to sharing what I learned about how to get in and out of the city with all the major highways blocked by police and troops.)

The second thing that happened involved David Kao, who had served as deputy director of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives for the White House. He began to tell all – and the “tell” was about how the key political handlers surrounding the President callously mobilized and used evangelical voters to get elected and then promptly ignored their concerns.

People like me.

I walked away from what had helped shape me for three decades – most of my adult life. I didn’t turn to the Democratic Party or other political groups. I simply walked away from the Republicans.

I began to do some serious soul-searching about what had shaped me. I realized that it had been less about what the Republicans stood for (or what most Republicans stood for) and more about what the Democrats had become.

Politically, I’m still adrift. I still am. And it is a good thing. I broke the lenses I was looking at life through, and I began to see more clearly.

To see more posts on these three chapters in The Social Animal – The Leader, The Soft Side and The Other Education, please visit The High Calling, where Laura Boggess is leading the discussion (and may be avoiding all this political stuff).

Dave Eggers' "Zeitoun"

Published in 2009, Zeitoun by Dave Eggers was a national bestseller for a time. I was vaguely aware of it, knew it had to do with Hurricane Katrina, and avoided it for that very reason. Anytime I read about Katrina, my blood pressure goes up. It’s too personal; too many family members were affected and I spent what might have been the worst three days of my life trying to get my mother and aunt out of the city (they insisted on staying through the storm).

But a friend highly recommended it, and so I bought it and have now read it. It wasn’t at all what I expected it to be. It was about the hurricane, and about one family’s experiences. But the real story snuck up and hit me right between the eyes.

Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun and their children are a Muslim family living in New Orleans. He is a native of Syria; she is from Baton Rouge and was a convert to Islam before they met (she’d been raised a Southern Baptist – now there’s a change). They owned an operated a home building/rehabbing/painting business in New Orleans, and also owned several rental properties in the city, several near their uptown New Orleans home.

As Katrina approached, Kathy left with the children and went to Baton Rouge to stay with family; she’d eventually end up with a close friend in Phoenix. Abdulrahman chose to stay in the city through the storm, to protect their home and, to the extent he could, the other properties they owned. For the first week after the storm, he paddled his aluminum canoe all over the uptown area, helping rescue stranded people and even feeding dogs left behind by neighbors. He maintained phone contact with Kathy through a landline that still worked at one of their rental homes.

And then – he disappears. Kathy will not hear from him or of him for more than three weeks.

I expected the story to turn toward the lawlessness and gangs that were roaming the city in the absence of established order. I didn’t expect that it was at the hands of established order that Zeitoun would find himself arrested without a warrant, held without charges, not allowed a phone call, strip-searched, placed in a fenced cell, given food his religion forbade him from eating, and then eventually taken to a prison near Baton Rouge. Only when a Christian missionary smuggled out a message did Kathy find out where he was.

Dave Eggers, who writes non-fiction like Tracy Kidder (House; Soul of a New Machine; Strength in What Remains), tells the story of one family’s experience with Katrina, yes, much like it was the story of thousands of other families, except with a difference – this family was Muslim, and Abdulrahman was de facto suspected by the “police authorities” of being a terrorist.

It says much about the breakdown of law and order in New Orleans and the surrounding region, and the interim order that was restored by the federal government, that his incarceration lasted for weeks. All you really need to know to explain so much of what happened is that this was done under the auspices of the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA.

FEMA couldn’t get food or water to thousands at the Superdome or New Orleans Convention Center. But within three days of the storm hitting the city, FEMA managed to have a temporary prison erected at the New Orleans Amtrak station, a prison that would eventually house more than 1,200 people, with food, water and supplies for guards and prisoners alike. The Superdome is two blocks – two blocks! – from the train station; the convention center is about 10 blocks away.

This is America, an America with a government so frightened that innocent citizens were vacuumed into an anti-terrorist machine while others were dying in attics and on the streets because that machine couldn’t figure out how to rescue them.

The charges against Abdulrahman were eventually dropped. He and Kathy eventually filed a lawsuit, which will wait in line for years with the other lawsuits filed against incompetence, stupidity and fear.

Eggers has told an important story, the story of what can happen when a government charged with protecting its citizens instead turns on them.

And this was our government. This is our government.

I don’t know what to say. No story is ever all black and white, and Eggers doesn’t tell this one that way. I can understand mistakes being made in the chaos that followed Katrina; what I can’t understand is why the mistakes couldn’t have been admitted and rectified. Innocent American citizens and residents were jailed without benefit of having charges made, without a court hearing, without bail being set for weeks, without even being allowed a phone call, and subjected to humiliation, degradation and brutality.

Perhaps Eggers should have borrowed the title of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s short novel about the Soviet Union, We Never Make Mistakes.

Loving Monday – The Compassionate Enterprise

I’m originally from New Orleans, a Nawlins boy born and raised. But I haven’t lived there since I graduated from college, and that was…a long time ago. But my mother still lives there, in the same house since 1956; my older brother lives in what is now a northern suburb across Lake Pontchartrain; and I have relatives all over the city.

In late August of 2005, I was at a school function for parents. And I was thankful that New Orleans had been largely spared from the ravages of Hurricane Katrina, particularly since my then-82-year-old mother and her older sister had refused to evacuate and decided to stay together in my mother’s house. I was listening to a presentation when my BlackBerry buzzed with a message from my younger brother, who lives in Houston. This is what the message said: “The levee on the 17th Street Canal has been breached. There are also reports that the London Avenue Canal has been breached.”

I knew exactly what that message meant. Exactly. New Orleans was flooding. The city had not been spared. It was everyone’s worst fears realized. The 17th Street Canal was a border between New Orleans and suburban Metairie, and it meant that some of the wealthiest parts of the metro area were flooding. The London Avenue Canal bordered the Ninth Ward, and it meant that some of the poorest sections of the city were flooding.

Then another message from my brother: the St. Charles Parish levee on Lake Pontchartrain had been breached. I knew what that one meant, too. The airport runways were going to flood. And possibly my mother’s house, which had survived every hurricane large and small for the previous 50 years without a drop of water inside the house.

The next five days were a nightmare. And my company, my Fortune 500 company that many people love to hate, demonstrated a depth of corporate and individual compassion that still amazes me.

The company has a large manufacturing plant on the river between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The plant had done a phenomenal job of shutting down and protecting the facility before Katrina arrived. But a third of the plant’s employees – more than 200 people – lost their homes because of Katrina. They had no place to live, not even with relatives because a lot of their relatives were in the same predicament. So the company brought in trailers for all of the employees and their families. A fund was created for employees to contribute to help those who had lost their homes. The company made a large and generous donation to the Red Cross for relief efforts. And employees from the manufacturing plant who had boats became part of the rescue flotilla, pulling people from atop flooded homes and buildings.

And then there was me, a total basket case trying to figure out how to get my mother and aunt out of the city. Miraculously, while she lost electricity (normal for a hurricane) and water (not normal; water pipes had broken everywhere), she still had phone service (erratic but she had it) and her house did not flood. The flooding stopped a few blocks away. That week, my boss let me work the internet and the phone to get them out of there, track down other family members (scattered from Florida to Texas and as far north as Ohio) and become a mini-information center for people trying to find family and friends. I didn’t do one lick of company work that week, but I worked 12 to 14 hours a day.

We got them out; a neighbor who had evacuated to Lafayette snuck past the military and police roadblocks to check on his house. He took my mother and aunt to my nephew’s house in Lafayette, and my brother eventually got them to Houston.

And my company, well, my company demonstrated its compassion and generosity. It’s a side most people don’t see – the side that sent donations and resources when tsunamis hit southern Asia, when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and when the earthquakes struck Haiti and Chile. It’s what the company does.

(Over at the High Callings Blogs, we’re discussing John D. Beckett’s Loving Mondays: Succeeding in Business Without Selling Your Soul. The discussion is led by Laura Boggess. This week, we’re focused on chapters 15 through 17, covering the ideas of the compassionate enterprise, extraordinary service and giving something back. Check here for last week’s discussion.)

Related posts:

Join today's discussion at HCB: What I Hold in My Hands.

L.L. Barkat at Seedlings in Stone: You a Philanthropist?

A Different Story: Risky Business

Katrina Stories

While I was in New Orleans last week, I was able to visit a bit with family, like my cousin Donna. Donna is a few years older than I am and has lived in the New Orleans area her entire life. The summer after Katrina (2006), she told me how fortunate she and her husband had been with the flooding. “We only had six inches,” she said. Dramatic pause. “On the second floor.” And then she laughed.

The line and the laugh epitomize Hurricane Katrina for me.

She lived in “the parish,” which for native New Orleanians means only one thing – St. Bernard Parish, the low-lying area below the eastern half of New Orleans and adjacent to the Lower Ninth Ward of the city. More than 90 percent of St. Bernard flooded. The levees channeling the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet disintegrated from the tidal surge; the levee break in the Industrial Canal that flooded the Lower Ninth also brought water into St. Bernard.

My cousin lived in the little town of Meraux. Several of her married children lived not far away. As the storm approach, her children left early. Donna and her husband stayed until Sunday morning, and then decided to leave. They picked up our then-86-year-old aunt from her house in the Lower Ninth and went to my then-82-year-old mother’s house in the western suburb of Metairie. The two elderly sisters decided they wanted to stay. After all, they had ridden out Hurricane Betsy in 1965, hadn’t they? And Camille in 1968?

You can’t imagine my reaction when I heard my mother and aunt had decided to ride out the storm. Well, maybe you can.

Donna and her husband drove on to Baton Rouge to stay with her sister. Almost 20 people were in the house, and it turned out they stayed there for several days. With no electricity, because Baton Rouge lost power for a time as well.

Five weeks after Katrina, my cousin was allowed back into St. Bernard for a short visit. The town of Meraux had not only been flooded; an oil refinery not far away had also leaked, spreading a fine sheen of crude oil everywhere, including inside the flooded homes. Water, muck, mold and crude oil.

By this time, Donna’s company (and her job) had moved temporarily to Houston. She was given a furnished apartment, with utilities and phone included, and a long weekend twice a month. She and her husband would drive to Baton Rouge on Friday night, stay with her sister, and then drive down to St. Bernard early Saturday morning. With two huge tubs of water and bleach. And all the necessities for cleaning muck, mold and crude oil, to try to salvage what could be salvaged.

This went on for months.

Donna found her china cabinet moved several feet by the water but upright and intact. All of her dishes and her collection of Depression glass were intact, if covered in yuck. That’s what the tubs of water and bleach were for. Her furniture and appliances were a total loss. Refrigerators could be replaced. The album of her wedding photos could not. Most of their important papers had been hurriedly yanked out of filing cabinets and pitched into plastic trash bags, and thrown in the car when they fled the storm.

She had six hand-decorated eggs sitting on her sideboard when the storm struck. She found one in an upstairs bathroom, and a second one underneath the ruined living room sofa. Both intact and unbroken. The other four had disappeared.

They decided to gut the house. During the times they weren’t there, migrants moved in. One night, a neighbor who had been cleaning her own house called Donna. “Your house is on fire,” she said. “It’s on fire.” It was. Someone left a smoldering cigarette in a mattress. It took the insurance company four months to complete the investigation, because Donna’s husband is a retired firefighter. “You know how to put them out,” she said, “you know how to start them.” Donna and her husband had just arrived in Baton Rouge when they got the call.

One of the worst parts of the storm, she says, was the bureaucracy. FEMA. The insurance company (“Was the flooding caused by rising water or was the water driven by the wind?”). The local parish authorities. Her retired husband lived on the phone, fighting bureaucracy. Donna and her husband fought. A lot of other people, emotionally destroyed by the storm and its aftermath, gave up.

Then there was the FEMA trailer. Their trailer was located in Mississippi; Donna was not going to live in front of the ruined shell of her house. The trailer sweated condensation. Donna got sick. But she refused to give up or give in. My cousin is a fighter.

Eventually, Donna and her husband moved into a new house across Lake Ponchartrain. They’re finished with St. Bernard. They stay in touch with friends from the old neighborhood, and they still own the vacant lot where their house stood. But they have to keep it mowed to four inches or less, or be fined $125 a day, the parish says.

Hundreds of thousands of people were displaced by Katrina. Donna is only one of those stories.