I needed to talk and write about my experience in the flood zone when I came home from the gulf coast in October 2005. I fell into silence after a few weeks, because words were unequal to the experience, but the experience stays with me. One reason is simply the horror of the devastation visited on so many people who did nothing to deserve it. A second reason was the sense I had walking through the flood zone that I was visiting America’s future, that similar devastation, delivered by other agents, would arrive in other places in my country in my lifetime. It was not unlike the feeling I had visiting Manhattan’s Ground Zero in October 2001.
It’s time to write again about New Orleans and the gulf coast, because a year and a half after the storms, the region is slipping away from us, in every sense of the word. Sports sections this week are filled with joy for New Orleans, as its professional football team, the Saints, goes to the National Football Conference Championship game for the first time Sunday. The Saints played all their games away from home in 2005 and this year’s return to the Superdome gave the Crescent City the only boost it’s had since the floodwaters receded. Sports columnists wonder how long the Saints will stay in New Orleans, which has neither the business support nor market size of other cities hosting sports teams.
By any measure, New Orleans’s future is not bright. Kanye West was right when he said, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” The disdain the White House has for poor black people – for poor people in general – has been made clear in the last 16 months. The Bush administration has proved capable when it wants to do something – cut taxes for the rich, invade nations, set up secret prison networks – so the lack of progress on the gulf can only be evidence of lack of will.
It’s not all Mr. Bush’s fault. New Orleans had been eclipsed as a major American city when the Mississippi flooded in 1928. The slow decline continued until by the turn of the century, New Orleans was a tourist destination propped up by good music, beautiful architecture, toothsome food and an easy morality. State and local officials were negligent, if not corrupt and the city’s physical and economic infrastructure was stretched so thin that a calamity of a much lesser magnitude than Katrina would have shattered it.
The city’s population is now half of what it was pre-storm. Many of those who’ve dispersed have begun new lives elsewhere and will not return. Many of those who have returned have found life so tenuous that they will leave, shrinking the city further. In one sense that’s probably a good idea. New Orleans sits below sea level and because we channeled Mississippi River over a century ago, southern Louisiana is subsiding; it’s only a matter of time before more “natural” disasters hit the area. In another sense it’s a profound tragedy, because New Orleans was – and for now still is – home to one of the true cultures America has produced. It was a special place, not a cookie cutter version of Everywhere Else, as so many American cities have become. New Orleans was also home to stable, working-class communities of all colors, another vanishing variety of American life the Bush administration is helping extinguish.
Crime is up in New Orleans, a recent wave of murders has residents afraid to walk the streets and compounds their despair. Some are contemplating whether it’s worth sticking it out. There’s no excuse for taking another human life, but when people are pushed to their economic and psychological limits, then the worst aspects of their personalities comes to the fore and violence occurs. It’s a form of giving up.
Further east, on the Mississippi gulf coast, Oreck, the vacuum cleaner announced this week that it is pulling its plant out of the region. Oreck had been hailed for its decision to stay after the storm, but it found that because the area was so slow coming back from the devastation, workers had difficulty keeping their lives together and working 40 hours a week. With Oreck gone, things will only get worse.
My favorite radio station is WWOZ New Orleans; I listen online (wwoz.org). The disc jockeys speak between songs about the ongoing difficulty of life in the city. They announce musicians’ funerals, so people can bring instruments to play or march in the “second line.” New Orleans funerals have always been an act of faith in resurrection. It’s going to take more than faith to resurrect New Orleans. It’s going to take a lot more than faith if we don’t want to surrender more and more of our nation to the fate of New Orleans. Faith without works is dead.
As Goes New Orleans…
I needed to talk and write about my experience in the flood zone when I came home from the gulf coast in October 2005. I fell into silence after a few weeks, because words were unequal to the experience, but the experience stays with me. One reason is simply the horror of the devastation visited on so many people who did nothing to deserve it. A second reason was the sense I had walking through the flood zone that I was visiting America’s future, that similar devastation, delivered by other agents, would arrive in other places in my country in my lifetime. It was not unlike the feeling I had visiting Manhattan’s Ground Zero in October 2001.
It’s time to write again about New Orleans and the gulf coast, because a year and a half after the storms, the region is slipping away from us, in every sense of the word. Sports sections this week are filled with joy for New Orleans, as its professional football team, the Saints, goes to the National Football Conference Championship game for the first time Sunday. The Saints played all their games away from home in 2005 and this year’s return to the Superdome gave the Crescent City the only boost it’s had since the floodwaters receded. Sports columnists wonder how long the Saints will stay in New Orleans, which has neither the business support nor market size of other cities hosting sports teams.
By any measure, New Orleans’s future is not bright. Kanye West was right when he said, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” The disdain the White House has for poor black people – for poor people in general – has been made clear in the last 16 months. The Bush administration has proved capable when it wants to do something – cut taxes for the rich, invade nations, set up secret prison networks – so the lack of progress on the gulf can only be evidence of lack of will.
It’s not all Mr. Bush’s fault. New Orleans had been eclipsed as a major American city when the Mississippi flooded in 1928. The slow decline continued until by the turn of the century, New Orleans was a tourist destination propped up by good music, beautiful architecture, toothsome food and an easy morality. State and local officials were negligent, if not corrupt and the city’s physical and economic infrastructure was stretched so thin that a calamity of a much lesser magnitude than Katrina would have shattered it.
The city’s population is now half of what it was pre-storm. Many of those who’ve dispersed have begun new lives elsewhere and will not return. Many of those who have returned have found life so tenuous that they will leave, shrinking the city further. In one sense that’s probably a good idea. New Orleans sits below sea level and because we channeled Mississippi River over a century ago, southern Louisiana is subsiding; it’s only a matter of time before more “natural” disasters hit the area. In another sense it’s a profound tragedy, because New Orleans was – and for now still is – home to one of the true cultures America has produced. It was a special place, not a cookie cutter version of Everywhere Else, as so many American cities have become. New Orleans was also home to stable, working-class communities of all colors, another vanishing variety of American life the Bush administration is helping extinguish.
Crime is up in New Orleans, a recent wave of murders has residents afraid to walk the streets and compounds their despair. Some are contemplating whether it’s worth sticking it out. There’s no excuse for taking another human life, but when people are pushed to their economic and psychological limits, then the worst aspects of their personalities comes to the fore and violence occurs. It’s a form of giving up.
Further east, on the Mississippi gulf coast, Oreck, the vacuum cleaner announced this week that it is pulling its plant out of the region. Oreck had been hailed for its decision to stay after the storm, but it found that because the area was so slow coming back from the devastation, workers had difficulty keeping their lives together and working 40 hours a week. With Oreck gone, things will only get worse.
My favorite radio station is WWOZ New Orleans; I listen online (wwoz.org). The disc jockeys speak between songs about the ongoing difficulty of life in the city. They announce musicians’ funerals, so people can bring instruments to play or march in the “second line.” New Orleans funerals have always been an act of faith in resurrection. It’s going to take more than faith to resurrect New Orleans. It’s going to take a lot more than faith if we don’t want to surrender more and more of our nation to the fate of New Orleans. Faith without works is dead.
© Mark Floegel, 2007