How we love New Orleans.
Sweet New Orleans.
Certainly you have heard the back-alley stories of the Big Easy: the booze, breasts, and brawl of mardi-gras season bourbon street, the witchcraft and esoterically indulgent corner shops selling everything from authentic voodoo dolls to authentic plastic mardi gras beads (made in some sweat shop in China).
New Orleans, unlike most of the places I’ve been, has a real soul. A dark soul, but a soul none-the-less. The culture of New Orleans, the heart beat of it, runs as deep as the roots of the Magnolia trees, and is as staggering as the dewey stormy skied moss that hangs from it’s branches.
New Orleans is where you go when you’re a kid from Baton Rouge who wants to be rebellious and go out drinking all night even though you’re still 17, where you go see chicks strip before you’ve even conceived the idea of sex or such adult perversions, where the riverboats are just as grandiose and beautifully painted as they were when Mark Twain was writing of them in the long passed golden days of a purer American sentiment, where you can go to café dumond into the morning hours with a cup of Louisiana coffee and plate of powdered beignets and let the world sink into your skin with the humid breeze coming just over the levee from the river.
The river to your left, the late-night wayfarer characters to your right, and an infinity of history more steeping into your bones. Almost any hour of the day there is a jazz band playing, a bright eyed little boy tap dancing on the corner, a gypsy promising to tell you of all that is to come, artists working their art on portable pop legged tables, seafood just off the boat being fried. This was New Orleans.
New Orleans is a James Dean, a Janis Joplin, a Jack Kerouac, a Martin Luther King, a Robert Johnson, an Elvis, a King. New Orleans is what all the affluence and architecture of an increasingly pretentious modern world cannot forge. New Orleans has a soul.
And I sit here in this metropolitan island, isolated and paralyzed. While the rest of the world is mobilizing, I can hardly move. What do you do? Giving money right now will certainly help the immediate needs, the food and water, and rescue efforts (which the federal government should have already taken care of, but clearly we can’t leave such issues as survival up to them… at least not when the people in need of survival are not privileged and white. Fuck!). But what about six months from now, a year from now, when our memories have been cramped with the latest news, the latest preoccupations, and more selfishly indulgent ways to again return to wasting our disposable incomes?
That’s what worries me. Because all the people were helping feed and house right now, will still not have homes to return to six months from now, or jobs, or any resource to provide for themselves. This affects the very poorest, the middle class and rich will recover. One third of the population of New Orleans lived in poverty before the hurricane hit. What now?
Mother nature’s tantrums can’t be prevented, but our civilizations and governments have significant resources on how to minimize (and possibly outright prevent) the damage caused by such disasters. The scale of disaster was well known and predicted. Officials KNEW the levees could only handle up to a category 3 hurricane, when Katrina was supposed to come in as a category 5 (she landed as a high 4).
Why has this hurricane affected so many people, and left so many people stranded without means for escape? We knew it was coming; we had time to get people out. Where was the National Guard (30-40% of Mississippi and Louisiana’s Nation Guard members were in Iraq)? Where were the evacuation teams, cars, busses, helicopters to get the people the hell out of there before it hit (those who did not have the luxury of owning their own cars or having the means/money to escape)?
It’s sick. It’s shameful. And it’s outright fucking unacceptable. And what a shame it is that it had to take such an extreme event of devastation for this inequity and discrimination rampant in our current governance to be highlighted and put on the neon signs.
The breaches in the levees could have been prevented, had proper funding requested been granted. It was denied, due to budget restraints because of the war in Iraq.
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/politics/12562638.htm
“The Washington Post reports that the project, which was supposed to cost $744 million overall, needed $62.5 million next fiscal year. The Bush administration proposed $10.5 million.
Engineers in the area had warned about catastrophic flooding for years. That left a Corps of Engineers spokesman offering this hollow explanation to USA Today about why New Orleans was so vulnerable: “We're talking about a tremendous effort at enormous expense at a time when the nation is strapped.”
Some resources to immediately help those in need:
http://www.hurricanehousing.org
http://www.secondharvest.org
Certainly you have heard the back-alley stories of the Big Easy: the booze, breasts, and brawl of mardi-gras season bourbon street, the witchcraft and esoterically indulgent corner shops selling everything from authentic voodoo dolls to authentic plastic mardi gras beads (made in some sweat shop in China).
New Orleans, unlike most of the places I’ve been, has a real soul. A dark soul, but a soul none-the-less. The culture of New Orleans, the heart beat of it, runs as deep as the roots of the Magnolia trees, and is as staggering as the dewey stormy skied moss that hangs from it’s branches.
New Orleans is where you go when you’re a kid from Baton Rouge who wants to be rebellious and go out drinking all night even though you’re still 17, where you go see chicks strip before you’ve even conceived the idea of sex or such adult perversions, where the riverboats are just as grandiose and beautifully painted as they were when Mark Twain was writing of them in the long passed golden days of a purer American sentiment, where you can go to café dumond into the morning hours with a cup of Louisiana coffee and plate of powdered beignets and let the world sink into your skin with the humid breeze coming just over the levee from the river.
The river to your left, the late-night wayfarer characters to your right, and an infinity of history more steeping into your bones. Almost any hour of the day there is a jazz band playing, a bright eyed little boy tap dancing on the corner, a gypsy promising to tell you of all that is to come, artists working their art on portable pop legged tables, seafood just off the boat being fried. This was New Orleans.
New Orleans is a James Dean, a Janis Joplin, a Jack Kerouac, a Martin Luther King, a Robert Johnson, an Elvis, a King. New Orleans is what all the affluence and architecture of an increasingly pretentious modern world cannot forge. New Orleans has a soul.
And I sit here in this metropolitan island, isolated and paralyzed. While the rest of the world is mobilizing, I can hardly move. What do you do? Giving money right now will certainly help the immediate needs, the food and water, and rescue efforts (which the federal government should have already taken care of, but clearly we can’t leave such issues as survival up to them… at least not when the people in need of survival are not privileged and white. Fuck!). But what about six months from now, a year from now, when our memories have been cramped with the latest news, the latest preoccupations, and more selfishly indulgent ways to again return to wasting our disposable incomes?
That’s what worries me. Because all the people were helping feed and house right now, will still not have homes to return to six months from now, or jobs, or any resource to provide for themselves. This affects the very poorest, the middle class and rich will recover. One third of the population of New Orleans lived in poverty before the hurricane hit. What now?
Mother nature’s tantrums can’t be prevented, but our civilizations and governments have significant resources on how to minimize (and possibly outright prevent) the damage caused by such disasters. The scale of disaster was well known and predicted. Officials KNEW the levees could only handle up to a category 3 hurricane, when Katrina was supposed to come in as a category 5 (she landed as a high 4).
Why has this hurricane affected so many people, and left so many people stranded without means for escape? We knew it was coming; we had time to get people out. Where was the National Guard (30-40% of Mississippi and Louisiana’s Nation Guard members were in Iraq)? Where were the evacuation teams, cars, busses, helicopters to get the people the hell out of there before it hit (those who did not have the luxury of owning their own cars or having the means/money to escape)?
It’s sick. It’s shameful. And it’s outright fucking unacceptable. And what a shame it is that it had to take such an extreme event of devastation for this inequity and discrimination rampant in our current governance to be highlighted and put on the neon signs.
The breaches in the levees could have been prevented, had proper funding requested been granted. It was denied, due to budget restraints because of the war in Iraq.
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/politics/12562638.htm
“The Washington Post reports that the project, which was supposed to cost $744 million overall, needed $62.5 million next fiscal year. The Bush administration proposed $10.5 million.
Engineers in the area had warned about catastrophic flooding for years. That left a Corps of Engineers spokesman offering this hollow explanation to USA Today about why New Orleans was so vulnerable: “We're talking about a tremendous effort at enormous expense at a time when the nation is strapped.”
Some resources to immediately help those in need:
http://www.hurricanehousing.org
http://www.secondharvest.org
posted by kristin diable | 3:34 PM
1 Comments:
Uh..
i dunno what to do. The whole situation has left me feeling empty, confused, and mentally exhausted. It's hard to know what is right in situations like this. What's the right choice? Rescue? Retribution? Healing? Disucssion? Preservation? Demolition?
Whatever is done - someone is inevitably going to be hurt or left out. i have the feeling something very nasty is brewing down here. and it scares me. Now is the time for wisdom.
---
Baton Rouge has really changed overnight. YoU wouldn't recognize it. It's like a cultural explosion. New Orleans has lent some of its identity to BR for a while. There is hope here, but the people are not really in charge of what is going on. and that's a damn shame. i get the feeling that things aren't going to be normal for quite some time. But maybe that can be a good thing....
& i dreamt of you last night.
kissy, kissy
Krissy, MKrissy
;-)
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