The first 15 minutes of the local news tonight was spent reporting on murders in the city. All of them tragic, all of them graphic. Two in particular have rocked the city: Dinerral Shavers, snare drummer for Hot 8 brass band, music teacher, and all around great guy was shot on a street corner, by a teenager aiming for his 15 year old stepson in retaliation for him daring to step on “enemy territory”. And Helen Hill, filmmaker, activist, and new mother was shot in her home in the Marigny while her husband, shot 3 times as well, held onto their toddler. Both of these extraordinary individuals were champions for New Orleans, brave and vital, and had only recently returned full-time to devote themselves to the rebuilding of the city. The first week of the New Year has been shocking for us, heartbreaking, challenging. We are reeling, grieving, meeting - fighting for everything we believe in. This is where we are and what we feel, life in New Orleans.
I’ve been traveling, visiting the outside world, and paying attention to what and how they see. I hear how they listen and I listen to how they speak. And I’ve not been to a single place where people don’t work, dream, struggle. There’s bad news everywhere, though it can’t be argued: some bad news is worse than others. Poverty is everywhere and alongside successful thriving families there are people fighting for basic human rights. Everywhere there are the high and mighty bigots, spouting absolute truths, furious about immorality and freedom, abortion and affirmative action and gay marriage. Everywhere there are high and mighty protestors spouting absolute truths, furious about governments running unchecked, the crimes of big business, and civil liberties being violated. And inevitably everyone is confronted with heartbreak, loss, death.
And from afar they watch how we who have identified ourselves as New Orleans behave. How we live and die. Or they don’t watch. But they do talk. They talk constantly about wrongs that need to be righted – writing editorials and blogging and reporting and talking on and on at the kitchen table on the internet on cable t.v. They are appalled by the world, on all sides of all political parties - they point fingers and want to vomit they’re so sick that the other person could not agree with them, and in the midst of all of this jibber jabber we are not talking about New Orleans in any substantial way.
It’s my (somewhat defensive yet reasonable!) opinion that they don’t want to talk because they don’t want to hear. About the crime, trailer life, depression and stress, FEMA, the fear, untenable situations, poverty, unemployment, housing crisis’, or environmental threats. Maybe they feel impotent, so consumed by the largeness of it that they can’t figure out how to even begin to help. Maybe they feel overwhelmed by their own lives to the point that paying attention to this feels threatening. Maybe they think we deserve what we get. I do know that they draw conclusions, pro or con, yea or nay. And either way: it’s just words, and hardly seems to be resulting in action or change. Their focus is generally on more present, obvious things. The dishes, bills, the new baby, what restaurant to go to for dinner, the Christmas list, the flu they can’t kick, the Netflix queue. Ordinary concerns that hardly fulfill us anymore. Even sudden death, getting laid off, chemotherapy, and whether or not to put Grandma in a nursing home are normal challenges that we were prepared as adults to deal with and had no idea would one day seem so sweetly naïve.
In the midst of this it’s rare to find anyone productively engaging with New Orleans, beyond memorializing it, condemning it, or marveling at the brave novelty of our lives. The clichés are cherished beyond belief: images of seersucker-suited and languid jazz musicians, cigarette smoking beatniks tooling around on rusty bicycles, portly jolly chefs stirring big old pots of red beans and jambalaya, mint julep-y uptown dames fluttering behind Blanche du Bois silk scarves, flamboyant gay men wearing hot pink feather boas and false eyelashes flirting, the romantic jazz funeral with mule drawn hearse and umbrella-d second-liners makin’ a proud ruckus in the good ole ghetto, dancing like you’ve never seen! Oh aren’t we fascinatin’, jasmine gumbo hot sauce perfumed and so wickedly decadent down on da bayou aieee, le bon temps roulet! We’re so spiritual and creative, we don’t need homes or jobs or health insurance. We only need some shrimps and bay leaves and we’ll be carrying on our traditions, happy little counter-culture side-show entertainers that we are! Besides, if it’s so bad why don’t we just leave? We can leave, can’t we?
The outside world in general is detached, by circumstance, from the cultural context of New Orleans. The history, ritual, ceremony and psychology - and the sheer intoxicating force of our love for these things (love is never rational). It is romanticized, trivialized, over-simplified and there’s no breaking down of barriers, no intimate understanding is cultivated. The noise continues, stereotypes are reinforced, it’s easier to put us out of mind. We remain marginalized, on rooftops waving sheets crying for help while the water drowns our elders.
So I would ask those who watch, those who have the luxury of distance from the violence, trauma, grief, and unique rewards of life post-Katrina – I would implore those who digest or negate, those who internalize, rationalize, defend, run, stay – I would plead with everyone to just stop. Stop for one moment and realize what New Orleans is on the brink of, how unique this culture is and how in danger of being utterly destroyed. Meditate on how you don’t know what this is like not as an insult but an invitation. If it takes recognizing that you don’t have it so bad then recognize. If it takes realizing that you irrationally love beignets at Café du Monde and would die if they disappear then realize. Whatever it takes to accept the opportunity New Orleans offers us now: as human beings, as Americans, as people who are tired of injustice. Validate how rare this time is, metaphorical and profound, how archetypal and crucial the outcome of New Orleans is. Do you know how close we are to the edge, to crumbling off the body of this country and sinking leaving a slow whirl of beads and bullets in our wake? How close we are to the abyss that every single human being on this planet is eventually confronted with? How close to the bone and heart we live, how honed to the essence, how much we have to celebrate and defend, and what can be learned from this. How seriously you are needed and how you can help.
I would ask everyone on the outside to resist the impulse to forget about the painful things New Orleans has come to symbolize and to re-engage. Act. Get involved with this/now, with this place that now represents everything Americans are ashamed of and that is paying the price for that inconvenient truth. I would ask the billionaire philanthropers, the celebrity adopters, the newsmakers and suburbanites and philosophers to push through the inertia, the denial, the walls that are being built up between us that seem stronger than even the levees that our lives depend upon. Listen to us, utilize us, empower us – we know what we need -
You can send a battalion of non-traumatized cops, teachers, and honest contractors, bolstering their salaries with a year of free health insurance for their families and stipends toward college education. Bill Gates can sweeten the pot with new computers and hybrid cars. Hell, offer all New Orleanians a year of free health care, stipends toward college education, new computers and hybrid cars. Bring your teenagers for the weekend to help senior citizens gut their houses while you teach workshops on running a successful small business. Help those of us who are acting outside of the ineffectual bureaucratic circus to create a solution - then teach us how to implement it. Invest in days of free flu-shots for everyone and get pharmaceutical companies to commit to providing low cost prescription meds. Donate new clothes for people to go on job interviews in. While you’re at it send therapists and masseurs and acupuncturists for free weekend seminars to help dissipate the stress. Offer tax rebates to gyms in exchange for a few months of free memberships. Donate textbooks, musical instruments, and art supplies. Lobby for legislation that imposes gun control.
Help us implement the necessary changes that need to be entrenched in order to keep the environmental destruction that is our death sentence at bay: the rebuilding and protection of the Gulf Coast wetlands, the proper disposal of industrial waste, and state-wide curbside recycling. Can’t Jay Z sponsor a water processing plant in St. Bernard parish? Can’t Oprah donate city buses that have a/c and windows that close and while she’s at it some bus-drivers to drive them? She could build a school in Central City for girls who if asked would not answer the question, “What do you need?” with, “An iPod, new Air Jordans, JLo perfume.” While she’s at it she could sponsor the construction of affordable housing and help bring these kids’ parents home (30% of public school kids are living here without their parents), bring the noble working class home so they can drive the buses and become cops and demo the houses and teach children how to read? Then she could give all the kids iPods, new Air Jordans, and JLo perfume because lord knows they could use a little superficial fun in their exhausting and scary lives, could benefit from not feeling impoverished or excluded for just one day.
I would ask our local politicians who respond to escalating violence with meetings where they discuss what they might do to address it, who approach the local clergy to get them “more pro-active” in fighting crime, to actually do something. Why should a community of pastors be burdened with solving this problem of violence? Shouldn’t the men and women who are paid to handle these issues be commanded to act? To do something tangible in the face of the growing madness that is overtaking New Orleans? How can I ask people who do not live here to participate and devote their energy to this situation if the politicians here in this city are not equally engaged? The citizens are engaged and we are wearied by City Hall press releases and curfews and stories of horrible police brutality by officers who appear to be exempt from retribution (the Danziger Seven). We need real solutions from the people who have been hired to provide us with those solutions. To tell us that they are “things aren’t as bad as you think” and that “a real plan will be unveiled soon” seems like a tactic to exhaust us, to delude us into thinking that we don’t matter. Checkpoints?!? It doesn’t take a criminal mastermind to figure out how to avoid them. More “crime cameras” by the end of the year? Surveillance isn’t a solution, it's a band-aid. When will they get to addressing what motivates the crime? And to ask a pastor to be responsible for solving what is motivating crime is grossly unjust at best. When I hear the mayor say for the 20th time how he’s meeting with pastors in response to escalating horrific violence I don’t feel any safer and I don’t imagine it can lead to any real change. When will meetings happen to create community centers, counseling services, drug rehab facilities, or getting public schools open and up to par? Talk really is cheap but now it’s costing more than any of us can afford.
I also ask myself and my fellow citizens to make a renewed effort to connect with each other. If the community of brass bands and the community of visual artists join forces, for example, and assert their presence as a collective, imagine the force of that action. Imagine the power we will have as an organized group who are furious about crime and have good ideas about how to diminish it, who are not willing to rest until all victims have been given voice, and who are wholly aware that we only function as a group to the extent that we are responsible as individuals. A passionate, empowered community that understands that when a teenager is shot in Treme it is as tragic as the cab driver’s murder in Algiers. Until both murders are solved, until both communities are protected, neither is safe.
A shower of gun fire just ignited about 10 blocks from here. It’s an unmistakable sound. Do you know it? Do you know it this well, and shrug it off, and still go out to buy a newspaper? To read about this year’s death toll:
Iraq = 8
New Orleans = 12
I hear the uproar on the outside about the Iraq war, the horror of it, how it needs to stop, how it was wrong in the first place, and how the politicians responsible for it are not to be trusted. The dialogue reaches a point of saturation and though I agree with it, I can’t help but think that the uproar is proof of how the country has fallen prey to a craftily designed distraction. A distraction from the reality of here and now - from our need, our poverty, our inherited planet, our dead brothers and sisters who are being slain right here in New Orleans.
I’m not in any way implying that we shouldn’t protest the dumb sick war. I’m well aware that dollars spent on that war could be funneled into New Orleans and potentially save our lives and that can’t happen until the war is over. My point is that maybe this is why they start those wars in the first place: to distract us from home. To exhaust the resources, material and emotional, that normally sustain us, keep our hearts open, keep us connected to our neighbors. To perpetuate a context of poverty and isolation to fuel poor-on-poor crime that, in theory, would result in the disappearance of the poor. So they can have their way. Make us too tired to change our habits, too tired to articulate our needs, or to realize that a 401k doesn’t mean shit if people are as desperate as they are here now. If we can’t get insurance companies to abide by the law and cut the checks they owe homeowners for flood damage, and to keep their rates reasonable so that landlords aren’t forced to charge exorbitant rents in a city that can’t offer competitive wages, if we can’t get everyone out of a trailer, build real levees, eliminate illiteracy, make healthy food and prescription medicines affordable, reverse the trends that are accelerating global warming, have safe public schools, and protect the vulnerable what else matters? If Americans are so detached from their ability to make a difference, to connect, to be personally responsible, to be charitable and compassionate that they cannot act then the American dream is dead on the vine, forever, period. And I’ll be glad to spend the rest of my days toiling away in this abjectness where nothing ever really dies it just festers in the swamp awhile to rise again some how some way.
