Witness New Orleans and Mississippi today, devastated by a natural disaster whose effects were multiplied by governmental incompetence. The worst off sections, with the poorest people, will most likely lay in ruin for many decades. The city of New Orleans may boldly promise to rebuild, but the new city will likely be a façade land like so much of America, with swank restaurants, glitzy hotels and some eternal candle burning along the river to commemorate the dead. Fat asses in the year 2015 will eat well at the new refurbished “Commander’s Palace” but you can be certain that the old wooden houses and front porches of the poor people will be desolate and abandoned. New Orleans will look like Detroit, a forgotten town of forgotten folks.

Los Angeles, like New Orleans, sits on an abyss of destruction. We foolishly go on building and obliterating as we pursue paradise on the shaky plates of the San Andreas fault. We know the Big One is coming, but we act as if it isn’t. Like New Orleans, we live in a city of unspeakable injustice and violence, where 52 young people have been murdered in Compton in this year alone. On that day when the quake collapses buildings, knocks out power, breaks the dams and stops the water supplies, will the looters refrain from looting? Will the uneducated and abused minorities in Los Angeles kindly offer to help? Or will this city become another hell of rapists and marauding gangs with guns?

Imagine the 405 and 101 in utter ruin, delivery trucks unable to bring groceries, water, and medical supplies. Hospitals, already obliterated by budget cutbacks, will be swamped with the injured and dead. Mobile phones and the Internet will be useless. Helicopters will swarm overhead but nobody will be in charge. If a Tsunami overruns the lower coastal plain between Venice and Palos Verdes, who will announce the evacuation? Who will rescue the survivors?

There seems to be a connection to how well we treat each other in normal times and how well we survive when all hell breaks loose. The prosperity and lower crime rates of New York City in the 1990’s, when once lost sections of the city like the South Bronx and Harlem came back to life, preceeded the awful hell of 9/11/2001 but also allowed the city to come together. By contrast, New Orleans was a festering, impoverished city of invisible poverty where murder rates were almost twice those of New York. When Katrina struck, did it surprise anyone that the most abused took out their abuse on other victims? The social contract holds society together in bad and good times.

There is probably no plan right now for the eventual cataclysm. We cannot believe in the promises of government anymore. That is what we have learned from Hurricane Katrina.