Jackson Free Press

Last year began on a high note for the Jackson Free Press, and it's closing on a high note—with our readership at an all-time high, our position as the city's most-read weekly publication cemented, and the biggest advertising issue we've published to date.

But what a roller coaster 2005 has been for us all—between a horrifying hurricane, a comedy of funding errors in the state Legislature, and a new city administration with the potential for sowing great division and confusion among Jackson's residents, I personally end the year on a note of concern.

I want my city, my state, my region to stand tall, to stand united to solve problems, to be determined to help each other with honesty and grace and compassion. But many of the signs at the moment are not good and are downright Dickensian in their complexity and intimidating enormity.

The most troubling concern for me personally is the division I feel growing between Mississippians on the Gulf Coast and our neighbors over in New Orleans. As John Grisham so aptly described in his piece in last Sunday's New York Times, the conditions on our Coast are bad. Horrifying. Unimaginable. When I went down to write about the Katrina aftermath a week after she hit, I saw images that will never leave me. They often come back to me in the middle of the night—the flattened neighborhood after neighborhood, the shellshock on the faces of people who had lost everything, loved ones, faith, hope. The stench. The inability, or ideological unwillingness, of our government to sooth our people's pain.

But I had another, niggling concern back during those horrible weeks: division. Ugly political division at that. I remember the blame games that began almost immediately as the ineptness and callousness of the federal government, and the inadequacy of state and local governments in Louisiana, were revealed. One of the immediate responses by the Bush administration to the exposure of their apathy in even noticing how bad the destruction down here was to blame Louisiana for their troubles.

At the same time, clearly due to the political party of the governor of Mississippi, our state got a bit of a pass. Things were better here; Haley Barbour was in complete control, we were assured. Thank God this wasn't Louisiana.

Barbour himself pushed this notion, publicly saying that Louisiana was asking for too much from the federal government, allowing the myth that Mississippi was more prepared for the inevitable devastating hurricane to grow. Barbour became a folk hero a la post-911 Rudy Giuliani even as Mayor Ray Nagin and Gov. Kathleen Blanco in Louisiana were demonized.

All the while, the truth right here in Mississippi is that we were not prepared, either. And a lot of that had to do with ideology, and strapped local and state governments, as well.

Such mythology might seem harmless, but it's not. The Biloxi Sun-Herald ran a column last summer calling on the state to pay more attention to hurricane preparedness. Then, days after the hurricane hit, the paper again ran an editorial begging both state and federal officials to respond to the horrendous conditions on the ground there. They begged national media to get one eye off New Orleans and into Mississippi, to see that our entire Coast was nearly wiped off the damned Earth.

Meantime, our governor was busy dressing down National Public Radio for daring to suggest that some of our National Guardsmen were needed more here in the homeland than abroad in Iraq. (Of course, commanders from both the state and the federal offices of the National Guard said the same thing, but Barbour never misses a chance to bash the "liberal media.") This is not to say that Barbour did nothing or said nothing useful; of course he did, and his tears were real. How could they not be?

But our governor is nothing if not a party man. And what that meant in Mississippi was that he assisted the Bush administration's tactics of playing down our horrors a bit in the beginning, even chiding Louisiana for asking for too much money, as if they were the greedy ones and everything was hunky-dory over here where folks weren't so avaricious, thanks to our great leadership. And then when the funding push came to shove, the governor's political clout wasn't enough to bring the resources we needed home to Mississippi in a timely fashion. The Bush administration probably figures this state is "red" no matter what, so what's the rush?

The problem now is worsening, as is the division, with too little action pitting the needy against the needy. As our people on the Coast sang "O, Come All Ye Faithful" in their tent cities, a desperate Sun-Herald ran another passionate editorial: Please pay as much attention to us as to New Orleans. Meantime, the Times-Picayune in New Orleans ran a bearing-the-soul editorial, "We needed levees, not more buses," accusing Republicans in Congress of playing politics with their fate and of spreading myths.

Nearly every day, I hear someone say that New Orleans gets too much attention, compared to the Coast. The truth is, Katrina-ravaged New Orleans can't get too much attention—and Katrina-flattened Mississippi has gotten too little. It just shouldn't be a competition for attention between people who have lost their homes and their lives in the richest nation in the world.

I've also heard a number of grumbles in Mississippi about the outrage that the flooding of the 9th Ward in New Orleans drew to the plight of poor blacks in inner cities. Again, it's framed as a rivalry by some Mississippians: People of all races and incomes lost everything on the Coast, they say angrily. What we have to remember is that both statements can be, and are, true at once: Katrina revealed much about the racist underbelly of America, and it showed that natural disasters do not discriminate. We shouldn't have to pick only one lesson from such a world-shattering event.

Next week, I expect the politicking and the ideological battles of will to ratchet up again when the state Legislature returns to Jackson. The truth is, we are facing a fiscal nightmare here in a state that has lost its bottom section, and much of its economic base, in recent months. Now is not the time to hear political pledges of "no new taxes" in a state that enjoys some of the lowest taxes in the nation, including on cigarettes, while we're facing the most difficult period in our recent history.

We need a new attitude in our state: a work-together, do-what-it-takes push to help each other in one of our greatest times of need. It is not the time for petty political games that divide us, and allow ideology to trump the desperate needs of everyday American citizens. The state Legislature, and the governor, should put aside ideology and set an example for the rest of the country to follow. The trials we face should bring us together, not tear us apart.