So, with all due respect to you folks outside New Orleans, I think y’all may be a little confused.
Thanks to the minuscule flame war that erupted after my Chris Rose rant, and thanks to a couple of emails I’ve recently received, it’s clear that some folks think New Orleans is still wallowing in sorrow like a P-I-G hog. That’s in part due to the fact that the media has moved on to cover presidential candidates and fashion week, meaning that images of the modern-day, new New Orleans have been fewer and further between in the national press
Which is not necessarily a bad thing. I mean, how many more times can we hear Anderson Cooper give the same field report about devastation and displacement? (I could watch it with the sound muted, but only ’cause he’s so freakin’ dreamy.) On the other hand, since you might not have seen us on the evening news, you might not know that many of us have gotten over it–the “it” being Katrina, the Corps, bureaucracy, political posturing, etc. Here’s an excerpt from a response I sent to one of the email queries that pretty much sums up my feelings and those of my family, friends, and co-workers:
Nearly three years after Katrina, yes, it is VERY safe to assume that many of us are tired of hearing the victim narrative. No, things aren’t fully back, but whatever: change is inevitable anywhere, the change in New Orleans was just accelerated. We’ve settled into the New Normal, and unlike that asshole Chris Rose, most of us aren’t weeping into our beer every evening. In big ways and small, most of us have moved on, emotionally speaking. Those who haven’t have moved on, geographically speaking.
Yes, we all hope that New Orleans will gradually become better than it was before the storm. (In certain ways, I think it already is.) Will it be perfect? Will it be utopia? I’m probably the wrong person to ask. To me, perfection has to exist in a bubble, and given the fact that everything is interconnected these days–informationally, electronically, meteorologically, and so on–that’s pretty much impossible. But New Orleans will continue to be a hub, there will be people living here, there will be Mardi Gras, there will be crime, there will be inequality, and there will be an ease of life unknown in most of America.
Also, I don’t think I’m the only one with these opinions. They’re pretty well documented elsewhere. Very few people–except some of the hippies who moved here after the storm and don’t know when to give it a rest–are still griping about storm-related stuff. Anyone who’s still here has to have made peace with it in some way.
I should add that by focusing only on the devastation and sadness that Katrina brought, in 60 minutes Chris Rose and Anthony Bourdain erased two and a half years of progress. The homes that have been rebuilt, the families and businesses that have returned, all the little triumphs that many of us have had, most of which came thanks to personal chutzpah and savings accounts–it’s like none of that mattered. Which is offensive and condescending and reprehensible, to say the least.
After however many months–29?–I’m really tired of making this argument, and I’m sure lots of people are really tired of reading it. But it’s like civil rights, or AIDS, or any other struggle for equality and recognition: until the dialogue shifts and we stop playing victim and become empowered, everything we do remains obscured by floodwater. Which sounds pretty hippy-fied, quite honestly, but there you are.
And besides, isn’t everybody over the whole “woe is me” story anyway? That dog won’t hunt no more.
sturtle [dot] com 