Essay Prompt

When Hurricane Katrina hit in August 2005, it wasn’t only a natural disaster; it was a test of the nation’s moral infrastructure. Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time (Hulu) and Katrina: Come Hell and High Water (Netflix) lay bare a grim truth: while government agencies stumbled, delayed, or failed outright, it was ordinary people—families, neighbors, church groups, and communities—who often became the real lifelines of survival.

This paradox deserves attention. Katrina exposed systemic abandonment: broken levees, collapsed evacuation plans, and botched relief efforts. Yet amid this neglect, stories emerged of neighbors carrying the elderly through floodwaters, families sharing scarce food, and communities improvising codes of loyalty and solidarity to keep one another alive. These grassroots responses were not bureaucratic; they were visceral, rooted in bonds of kinship, shared suffering, and a deep sense of responsibility to one another.

The films reveal a cultural alchemy unique to New Orleans—where music, food, faith, and kinship traditions already wove people together. During Katrina, those traditions became lifeboats, not metaphorically but literally. In the absence of functioning institutions, families and neighbors reinvented survival itself, showing that human dignity doesn’t only exist in comfort or prosperity but can be forged in the crucible of catastrophe.

Your Task: Write a 1,700-word essay analyzing how bonds of kinship and community loyalty functioned as lifeboats of survival in post-Katrina New Orleans.

Address the following questions in your essay:

• How did family love and neighborhood trust create improvised survival systems when formal institutions failed?
  
• In what ways did communities create a code of resilience, a shared moral contract, during the disaster?
  
• What lessons can be drawn from this improvisational solidarity about human dignity, loyalty, and the meaning of community in times of collapse?
  

Your essay should balance analysis of the documentaries with close attention to human stories of resilience. Use specific examples and consider how these lessons apply beyond Katrina: What do they teach us about disaster, community, and the fragile but essential bonds that keep us human?

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Sample 9-Paragraph Outline

Introduction (1 paragraph)

• Hook: Paint the scene—abandoned streets, flooded houses, helicopters circling, and yet neighbors wading through water with makeshift rafts.
  
• Context: Briefly note government failures highlighted in both documentaries (FEMA delays, stranded citizens, broken levees).
  
• Thesis: Argue that when institutions collapse, kinship and neighborhood bonds become codes of resilience—informal but powerful lifeboats—that preserve human dignity, improvise survival, and reveal enduring truths about community loyalty in catastrophe.
  

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Body Paragraph 1: Government Collapse vs. Community Response

• Detail FEMA delays, local government paralysis, and the abandonment felt by residents.
  
• Contrast with ordinary people organizing rescues, distributing food, and opening their homes.
  
• Set up the theme: resilience grows where systems fail.
  

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Body Paragraph 2: Families as First Responders

• Show how families stayed together, sharing resources, protecting elders and children.
  
• Examples from the films: families wading together through water, refusing to abandon one another.
  
• Argue that love in the family unit became the most reliable “infrastructure” of survival.
  

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Body Paragraph 3: Neighbors as Kin

• Explore how neighbors expanded the definition of family.
  
• Community members who had never spoken before suddenly acted as protectors and caregivers.
  
• This shows the elasticity of kinship: disaster stretches the definition of who counts as “family.”
  

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Body Paragraph 4: The Code of Resilience

• Define the unwritten rules that emerged: share what you have, protect the vulnerable, don’t abandon your people.
  
• These codes operated faster and more effectively than bureaucratic policies.
  
• Examples: strangers pooling resources, neighborhood patrols against looters, churches as shelters.
  

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Body Paragraph 5: Improvisation as Survival Strategy

• Show how ordinary people became engineers, medics, and rescuers.
  
• Example: makeshift boats, rafts, and supply lines.
  
• Connect to the broader point: resilience is not planned in a manual; it is improvised under pressure.
  

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Body Paragraph 6: Dignity Amid Despair

• Explore how solidarity preserved dignity in dehumanizing conditions (Superdome chaos, flooded homes).
  
• Argue that dignity comes not from institutions but from mutual recognition—neighbors affirming each other’s worth when society seems to have abandoned them.
  

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Body Paragraph 7: Lessons Beyond Katrina

• Broaden the lens: how does this apply to future disasters (pandemics, climate change, social unrest)?
  
• Argue that resilience depends less on bureaucracies than on the cultural strength of communities.
  
• Point: family and community loyalty may be the last firewall against collapse.
  

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Body Paragraph 8: Counterargument & Rebuttal

• Acknowledge critics: some argue neighbor-to-neighbor efforts were insufficient or uneven, that only systemic reform can prevent tragedy.
  
• Rebuttal: While systemic change is essential, Katrina shows that human dignity cannot wait for bureaucratic rescue—it depends on immediate solidarity.
  

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Conclusion (1 paragraph)

• Restate thesis: Katrina revealed abandonment but also exposed the cultural wealth of kinship and loyalty as lifeboats of survival.
  
• End with a powerful image: in the floodwaters, where the state faltered, the human heart did not.
  
• Call to action: value, protect, and invest in community bonds before the next disaster arrives.