For my New Orleans tribe, on our unwanted anniversary
So. It’s been two years. The memorials and the commemorations and the celebrations are ramping up, and I have to admit, I won’t be attending any of the hullabaloo.
This time last year, I was living in my gutted house as my man and I put it back together around us. It was hot and exhausting and I’ve never worked so hard in my life. When I asked anybody, everybody, if they were going to any of the K-related festivities, the answer was always the same: “Hell no.” They were working on their own houses, going to their jobs, living their lives. The consensus was that the memorials were more political photo-ops for the money-rich or time-rich, than they were for the populace of a city for whom the hard work had only just begun.
Therefore, that I’m moved to write this now makes me something of a hypocrite, doesn’t it? And yet, I don’t want to talk about that rainy, windy, bitch, or the failure of our federal government to protect us with the money we gave them for that purpose, or the crazy, exhausting blur of the last two years as we all try to regain some normalcy in the midst of lives that even before, had anything but.
What I want to do is congratulate all of you who have dug in, soldiered on, gritted your teeth, rolled up your sleeves, and are working to make your home, your city, and your lives your own again.
No one else, anywhere else, will ever understand what it is you’ve been through like we do. They may cluck with sympathy, they may have sent money on to the Red Cross, they may have housed you in a faraway land, they may have changed the channel when yet another story came on about stupid, destroyed New Orleans who got what it deserved, but here, we GET it. Like it or not, we have been made into one extended, dysfunctional family with a shared reality. Where else in the world can such an innocuous question as “How much water did you get?” take on such onerous overtones? Where else does a Lowe’s or Home Depot resemble a multicultural circus? Where else can you laugh, or cry, over a Wednesday afternoon cocktail as you compare skyrocketing costs of sheetrock and wiring?
I know New Orleans is aggravating, scary and crime-ridden as hell. The frightened, dangerous children, killing other children when they’re not making more or brutalizing the rest of us. The crumbling infrastructure. The caboose-less parade of corrupt officials begging forgiveness for that which they crucified their constituency. The streets that still flood, the missing road signs that confuse even the longest-term residents, the lackluster schools, the poverty cheek-by-jowl with the entitled, the escalating crime rate coupled with an overburdened, understaffed police force. The reasons to leave seem almost insurmountable.
But even these things bind us together with invisible threads of simpatico and camaraderie. The rest of the country will never understand why we fight to keep living here. They see a week of flashy parades and cheap baubles and overindulgence and can’t equate all the difficulties with a blip of perceived debauchery. But still, they visit US. And when their vacation is over they return to cookie-cutter lives replete with ticky-tacky houses, 80 hour workweeks, air-conditioned muzak elevators and two hour commutes. They drive-thru a Burger King for dinner and get home just in time to numb themselves in front of the television before passing out and doing it all over again the next day.
What they don’t understand is that here, we are free to be our ourselves, more than anywhere else I’ve ever been. I can afford to make a living as an artist here, own a home here. Here, the question is not “What do you?”, but “What are you passionate about?” Here, we have whole rooms devoted to our kink, be it costuming, painting, metalworking, music-making, glass-blowing, or…kink. Here, we can devote our lives to being ourselves, and I’ll make any sacrifice I have to in order to live the way I want, and be surrounded by people who do the same. It’s real here. We’re not isolated from the realities of life and death. We live hard every damned day, we know what we’re up against, and it makes the good times all the sweeter. We FEEL things here. We’ve learned how tenuous our hold is on life, and we respect it all the more because of that knowledge. We’ve been isolated in a plastic place, and I don’t ever want to be there again.
So to all of you who are sticking it out, working your asses off, rebuilding your homes, restarting your lives, and are using this hellish setback as an opportunity to make better, brighter lives for yourselves and your city, thank you.
You are the ones who make it all worth it.
August 30th, 2007 at 9:18 am
Watch the video, all the way to the end.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVfswkDIaZk
August 31st, 2007 at 10:38 am
But still, they visit US. And when their vacation is over they return to cookie-cutter lives replete with ticky-tacky houses, 80 hour workweeks, air-conditioned muzak elevators and two hour commutes. They drive-thru a Burger King for dinner and get home just in time to numb themselves in front of the television before passing out and doing it all over again the next day.
Another comment carefully calculated to elicit the sympathy of the rest of America, I suppose. I can still remember a time when I used to care what happened to post-Katrina New Orleans - this was, of course, before I learned that the city had such ineffable splendor that everyone else was subhuman.
There is, of course, another point of view. It is that you don’t matter. New Orleans is a strange, isolated lacuna, like Key West or Nome. Other people will occasionally - or at least used to - come and look at your city in curiosity at its peculiarity. And then, when they’re finished, they go back to the real world, and do things that matter in places that matter.
Therefore, remain in your swamp and drink your Wednesday afternoon cocktail. Weep that physics and nature flooded your city, and blame it on President Bush, or the Army Corps of Engineers, or the French Mississippi Company, if you like. Abjure gratitude for the National Guardsmen who prised you from rotting houses, or the Coast Guard who plucked you from the fetid water. Proclaim that, because the government could not protect you from natural disaster, it should not even have tried. Demand more sheetrock, or more welfare payments, or more attention. Believe, if you like, that you alone possess art, or culture, or the ability to live properly.
But you have exhausted first the patience, then the sympathy, and now even the curiosity, of those whom you demanded to save you, and those whom you now demand to restore you. Goodbye, New Orleans, and farewell.
August 31st, 2007 at 1:06 pm
I can see that no one outside of NOLA can know what it is like to live there, and that you do share a very unique bond with your fellow & sister citizens. However, you make it sound as though everyone who lives outside of New Orleans is in the upper middle class. I mean, don’t you think there are people who live outside of New Orleans who, say, take a subway or bus to work? Who are unemployed? Who live in housing projects? There are HUGE dichotomies, HUGE discrepancies WITHIN every major (and minor) U.S. city. You don’t think extremes of wealth and poverty exist right alongside one other in, say, New York?
Conversely, don’t you think there are some doctors in New Orleans who work 80 hours a week…(and probably don’t get enough sleep to take good care of their patients, because they are overworked…) Do only artists live in New Orleans?
Further, there are many neighborhoods across the U.S. that are being ripped apart by violence. This is ABSOLUTELY TRUE. Over the past month, I read more stories of innocent people being gunned down than I can even remember. And I don’t even live in a city especially renowned for having heavy gang activity. The difference in NOLA is that the violence spreads into areas that used to be considered relatively safe. But there are many people living in relatively safe parts of a city who have no idea what it feels like to live in the most dangerous blocks of the most crime-ridden areas of that same city. Again — there are huge discrepancies within each city. Even though, again, I agree that no one who lives outside of NOLA can really have any idea what the experience is like.
August 31st, 2007 at 5:04 pm
p.s. I just posted above… and I realized I could have been slightly misreading Marrus’ screed. What I missed the first time is that If you dig underneath the surface, you could almost read that she’s SYMPATHETIC to the plight of the people she imagines grabbing Burger King meals on the way home to their “ticky tacky” houses… She feels very fortunate that she and her friends ESCAPED that cookie-cutter fate. The dream of NOLA is worth fighting for because, as hard and terrifying as that struggle may be, she perceives it to be thousands of times more noble and rewarding than living a “cookie-cutter” life.
But at the same time, I think I was partly right in my response. I don’t think Marrus or other NOLA activists always acknowledge the many souls working their butts off to make a difference in every community across the U.S., every day. I’m actually pretty lame and non-activist lately, but I know that every city has people who are truly committed… Why not celebrate them, give them some credit, not just sound like you are “hating” on everyone in the U.S. outside of New Orleans? And what if some people do get burned out on the idea of helping NOLA because they’re already knocked out by, say, working as an underpaid social worker or inner city teacher or counselor; or Big Brother/ Sister; or spearheading a nonprofit initiative or public-private partnership, in the roughest streets of Chicago, Detroit, L.A., New York or etc.? If someone’s going to take me to task for not paying sufficient attention to the problems that plague New Orleans, I’d rather they also call me out for not doing enough to solve problems in my OWN city.
( I’m actually hoping to help galvanize myself into action through posting some comments — not use the internet as another excuse for NON-action on my part).