Bruce Chambers, Orange County Register (click for larger view)

Tom Watson asks us to look at this photo, which seems to sum up so much of the heartbreak, tragedy, and heroism in the aftermath of Katrina.

The Post-Gazette and The OC Register (registration required) have the full story behind this photograph; Will Bunch adds additional details — including FEMA’s criminal obstruction of such rescues — in this Attytood post.

Will writes:

One of Tom’s commenters dubbed this photograph “Our modern day Pietà.” I can think of no better description for it.

In a previous post, On Looking at Photographs of the New Orleans Dead, I wrote that “only when we are willing to look at what our nation has wrought can it be saved, if it still can be saved.”

But the error contained in the title of that post is now clear: for it is not only photographs of the dead that reveal the painful cost of this administration’s criminal negligence, but also photographs of the near-dead, the barely-living, and the just-hanging-on.

When you look at this photo, keep Will’s post in mind: the men and women bearing Edgar Hollingsworth’s frail body saved his life by actively disobeying FEMA orders.

If there is hope to be found in this photograph, it is in the faces and actions of these rescuers. Their determination to do what is right, in the face of so much that is wrong, is nothing less than inspiring.

But one has to wonder how many others were passed by because they did not have the strength to cry out for help.

Edgar Hollingsworth is expected to survive.

The prognosis for the dignity of our nation is much less sanguine, as long as our leaders continue to ignore the weak and the poor.

Share This