After the flood: Reflections on the Fate of New Orleans

After the flood: Reflections on the Fate of New Orleans.

New Orleans, the fabled southern city of jazz and good times, has since become a surreal underwater “dark hell” crossed only by army vehicles, and populated by “rotting corpses and armed gangs." Like anyone else, I find myself riveted to the stream of information and events coming out of the aftermath of a city (i once knew and loved inspite of itself)…here’s a few things I’m contemplating at the moment:

A popular theme in most post-apocalyptic scenarios is the question of how human society might go about reorganizing itself after annihilation. As a person who is perennially interested in communities and how they work, I thought this was interesting: Spontaneous communes "pockets of the funky, the hardcore New Orleans types, who in the midst of disaster have set up their own communes in the French Quarter...since then, they've swept up debris from the streets of the French Quarter, and even cleaned up Jackson Square. They also marched in a scaled-down version of Southern Decadence, mini-gay pride parade usually held this time of year...'' Its reaffirmed my faith in people. It's extraordinary. I've never seen anything like this,'' Derek said. ``We're all going to walk away better people...''

Lots of people probably don’t realize that there have been, all along, a number of very interesting squatter communities and “communes” in New Orleans. Part of me thinks that whatever long-term solutions come out of this disaster, will come in part, from the spontaneous interactions between people who have shared stakes in rebuilding their lives together.

The Prison Bus It’s never too early to start thinking about incarceration…I had thought the first thing to be rebuilt would be Walmart…I was wrong.
Apparently in New Orleans, they are using the Greyhound Station for a temporary jail. “the downtown Greyhound bus station, is now a jail. The bus stalls are still numbered 1 to 16, but now each number hangs over a cage hastily constructed from chain-link fencing and razor wire.” Kind of ironic, considering that most of the people I’ve run into in the bus station in the past are probably pretty familiar with jails.
The New Orleans PD is pretty beat up at the moment, "..."New Orleans Police Department...now has only a few hundred officers, after numerous resignations...So the jail is being run largely by prison guards brought from the maximum-security Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola". Now there’s a controversial institution if ever there was one…"The 18,000-acre prison is a former slave plantation that was a private prison, said to be under the direction of a former confederate general, until the turn of the century”.

Toxic Soup "The water that still covers about 60 percent of the city is highly contaminated. It's full of raw sewage, gasoline, chemicals from factories and bodies." "The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says its initial testing in New Orleans waters shows very high concentrations of lead and of E. coli and coliform bacteria."
So naturally they want to pump all this back into Lake Pontchatrain, and by association, straight into the Gulf of Mexico. “Lake Pontchartrain is the largest estuary in southern Louisiana. It is an important recreational, commercial and environmental resource for New Orleans and southeastern Louisiana.”
I realize of course that the water has to go somewhere, and I’m sure everyone’s eager for it to go somewhere and go somewhere right now, but it seems that as a long term solution, this is a poor one. "The dirty New Orleans water is being pumped back slowly to the city's Lake Pontchartrain...the pollution runoff could poison the Gulf of Mexico, whose fisheries are already threatened by chemical runoff from Midwestern U.S. farms..." Yuck.

Get out! "Local officials said…they would begin forced evacuations of all residents, including people living in dry and undamaged homes." Why would anyone want to stay? It’s hard to leave behind the only place you know. For a lot of people their sense of identity is firmly anchored to place. “I haven't left my house in my life. I don't want to leave,' said Anthony Charbonnet, shaking his head as he locked his door and walked slowly backwards down the steps of the house where he had lived since 1955. "Nobody really wanted to leave, everyone had reasons…Mostly, it was the realisation that the homes they were sitting in were all they had in the world". Another reason is that hurricanes are a fact of life that most coastal dwellers are used to psychologically. "They…survived Betsy and they survived Andrew and Camille and that they just don't want to go." Although it seems irrational at times, it seems to be a pretty normal response to surviving a disaster. For some of these people they’re gonna have to herd them into trucks with guns to their heads. That’s a disturbing thought.

Political ramifications: Politicians of course like to use these scenarios to their best political advantage. W doesn’t miss a beat--a perfectly good chance to say something completely moronic fortunately, does not go to waste. “Bush said, ‘We've got to solve problems. We're problem solvers’. Glad to know that some things never change.
Here’s a quote by a survivor, that mirrors my thinking on the subject…“I'm not blaming Bush, I'm blaming our government as a whole. We are too busy minding other people's business than to help our own people." Yep, so much for homeland security. A leading Republican senator, Susan Collins of Maine, seems to agree with me on this and “called the response "woefully inadequate." "If our system did such a poor job when there was no enemy," Collins said, "how would the federal, state and local governments have coped with a terrorist attack that provided no advance warning and that was intent on causing as much death and destruction as possible?" With most of the military overseas defending our strategic oil interests, there weren’t too many people around who were able to mobilize quickly. Whatever you may think about the desirability of the military to intervene/help at times like these, you gotta admit they sure can mobilize pretty darn quickly when they need to. (Compared to politicians who need focus groups, polls and committees before they decide its safe to act).
My thinking on this is that the government was “out of order” when the shit hit the fan. "Governments at all levels failed," said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine. Hillary Clinton, a senator from the other team says that "The people that I met in Houston – they want answers…want to know what went wrong and they want to know what they are going to be able to count on in the future." Naturally a perfectly good opportunity to “launch investigations” and form panels won’t go to waste here. Hillary’s wry comment on this I think pretty much says it all…"I don't think the government can investigate itself." I’m sure all the politicians and pseudo politicians will use the situation to their best advantage and the refugees of New Orleans will go on being poor, black, and now homeless to boot. Cynically, I suspect that things will go on pretty much as they always have, but hopefully many people will realize that this was a well needed wake up call.

WWLouisArmstrongD? At the end of it all, though, I have a lot of faith in humanity. So here’s to all the people who will “Keep on Keepin’ on.” The other day while walking down the street, I heard a Louis Armstrong song and it made me smile.
”Do you know what it means, to miss New Orleans,
And miss it each night and day--
I know I’m not wrong, this feeling’s gettin’ stronger,
The longer, I stay away--
Miss them moss covered vines, the tall sugar pines,
Where mockin’ birds used to sing,
And I’d like to see, that lazy Mississippi, hurryin’ into spring
The moonlight on the bayou, a creole tune that fills the air,
I dream about magnolias in bloom, and I’m wishin’ I was there…”