The living and dying in New Orleans

08/04/08 17:15

New Orleans is hurting. She is bleeding from the wounds she got two years ago, and she still needs help. The problem is that a lot of her suitors never really wanted her - they wanted her name, her reputation. Her soul never mattered to them as they merely wanted to put her in a cage and show her to passers by. The prestige of possessing beauty is more important than living with it. And as such they’ll try to make replicas and plastic imitations to put up all over the city claiming to have her, but they don’t - and they probably never will.

The beauty is not in the appearance but in the spirit, in the will to live and enjoy.

When Katrina hit New Orleans roughly 40% of the inhabitants were left without a home. They were forced to move from the city as fugitives from a war, and many of them never returned. The 9th Ward of New Orleans was all but obliterated by the flooding caused by the rise in sea level and the governments failure to secure the levee (although they had known for years that it was insufficient). Both on local and federal level there seem to be a incompetence and disregard bordering on malice towards the inhabitants who are still homeless.

When the residents from the 9th ward tried to return home they found the 9th ward to be in lockdown. They were refused admittance to their old neighborhood without a clear reason - basically only that it was unsafe, and that the entire ward was being demolished to make room for waterfront casinos and residential housing - a housing that the former inhabitants had no possibility of paying for, and they would as a direct consequence be unable to return home. In fact the City Counsel told them in rather direct terms that they were no longer welcome in New Orleans.

Apparently local authorities saw Katrina as a somewhat convenient way of getting rid of lower income classes and ‘scaling things up a bit’. Several real estate tycoons wanted to develop profitable casinos and convention centers along the shore as well, so everything was getting set up to in adherence to the Spain/Italy pre-WW II way, ie. solving problems by getting rid of them.

They haven’t succeeded yet. They haven’t stopped trying, but the opposition is getting stronger.

We met Andy at a bar in the French Quarter. He had just returned from a two month involuntary vacation in Los Angeles caused by massive surgery to his stomach and intestines due to living with a lacerated ulcer for a longer period of time. The ulcer was caused by working as a volunteer in the 9th ward, cleaning up and then rebuilding it. He worked all eighteen months without pay.

He arrived 6 months after Katrina, and basically just wanted to help people in need - and he ended up staying for eighteen months. When they started the clean up process, and keep in mind that this was half a year after Katrina, they were finding the bloated bodies of humans and animals alike. Although the government claimed to have recovered the bodies, and that they had even marked all the houses in the area as ‘checked’ (they had a system of ‘x-ing’ the houses checked), the volunteers told a different story.

It was evident that no one had entered the houses. No one had bothered to check if there were bodies inside (rumor has it this grounded in the fact that they were gonna demolish it, but that is unsubstantiated). The authorities spent their time trying to keep the volunteers out of the area instead of trying to help cleaning it up. Several times the volunteers were held up at gunpoint and forced to leave the area.

In spite of all this treachery, deceit and what seems to be a clear cut case of ill will the people of New Orleans keep smiling at life. They’re still in love with her. They accept her as flawed but insist that it’s a vital part of her beauty. They keep going out at night listening to music and drinking cold Abitas. They keep creating New Orleans by enjoying it, and that is what she is.

New Orleans it the unification. In her ldim lights we are the same. In the deafening sound of a Bourbon Street jazzbar we are all poets and lovers, regardless of income, regardless of standing. And please, let’s keep it that way.

But just because you see them smiling, don’t assume they’re okay.

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Dreaming in the Land of Dreams.

The living and dying in New Orleans