Dispatch on Postville--Small Town Katrina

The last day has been the most harrowing of the trip so far, at times leaving the team at a loss for words. Postville, Iowa, much like Riverside, NJ was a ghost town, but the wounds deeper and fresher here only months after America's largest single site raid at Agriprocessors tore through its fabric like a hurricane that didn't need to be. The trauma left behind was unspeakable. Main street was speckled with a few floaters, African-American, Somali, Sudanese, Orthodox Jewish, and Latino families, or what were left of them. The divide-and-conquer techniques deployed by management to silence the workers they oppressed by segregating them according to race carried over to the town's dilapidated streets, only meters from the plant itself. What better delegate for this task than the oppressed themselves.

And much like the catastrophe of Katrina, the government's response here left its most basic duty, to guard the welfare of its people, to be desired. No politicans visited. Letters seeking assistance went unanswered. Clearly, the stripping apart of an entire town was not worth their time. The town's pastor was mournfully hesitant in answering the question of how Postville goes about recovering from this: "It will be a slow, slow process that will take a long time." The hardest pill to swallow, for sure, is that unlike the Katrina and Iowa's own floods this summer, this disaster was designed to destroy.
-MB