Katrina fifth anniversary

Po Boy Views
By
Phil LaMancusa
All The Kings Horses
Or
Hey Jude
Hurricane Katrina: what can I say that hasn’t been said ad nauseam? What can I tell you that you haven’t already seen on ‘Treme’? That we were some of the last ones to leave and some of the first ones back (and that’s with putting in over five thousand miles on the road)? That when we left the city was broken, we thought beyond repair, and when we came back, it was to a battered but unbowed wreck, mugged by nature, left to drown when levees didn’t hold, occupied by the military and ravaged by civil disobedience? Yes.
Yes, we came back to take a sad song and make it better. What else could you do after a wash the size of 16 Manhattans bitch slapped the Gulf Coast? 50,000,000,000 gallons of water from broken levees in 80% of New Orleans alone and alone we found ourselves; 500,000 citizens displaced, blown to the four corners. “Crying won’t help you, prayer won’t do you no good; when the levee breaks, Mama you’ve got to move”.
The waters shredded all boundaries with its destruction: economic, social, political and racial. Patricians and plebeians alike perished and providence had no regard for the pureness or poorness of a person’s soul; we all took the hit. All at once, we all became very fragile and extremely… mortal.
For the first nine months back we swept our own streets until the mayor signed a company for five times the cost of pre Katrina times, recycling became a distant memory, light poles were out and eighty percent of the city was in darkness, coffin flies blackened the air and trash and rotting refrigerators lined the street. No mail delivery. Remember? Debris piled up stories high, our stories piled up like psychic debris, we came back not because we wanted to; we came back because we had to. In prescience how could we not have come back? Unthinkable. Would we abandon a wounded comrade? A dying relative? A beaten home team?
We rolled up our sleeves and got to work putting back together the city that care forgot; we were a city of motherless children coming back to care for our home--we are still orphans of the storm--it’s been three steps forward and two steps back for five frigging frustrating years. It’s as if greener pastures are not in our futures.
The mayor said that he wanted the recovery to be driven by the economy; ergo rents doubled. The mayor said that the city wanted everybody back; and so they closed and eventually tore down the projects and homelessness tripled.
We developed three different strains of Katrina coughs; predictably, we were told that there was no such thing. We knew about lootings, rapes, bodies and gun battles between police and citizens; blithely that was all swept under the rug and whitewashed.
The fuster cluck of the repairing of miles of sewer pipe and fresh water lines and gas pipes and streets, oh the streets. Get this, the administration said that, purposely, they, and this is five years in, only went around repairing twenty percent of the streets that accounted for eighty percent of the traffic; that traffic being commuters. I personally don’t know who these commuters are and I also don’t know how, in five years, we have only been able to fix a paltry twenty percent.
Five years in, we have cell phone towers in our streets that serve no function; we have electronic parking meters (even in less affluent sections of town) with increased rates, property is being taken away under the guise of imminent domain, still almost 60,000 residences on the blighted list, new hospitals in the works while storm affected ones remain shuttered and the majority of the so called ‘recovery effort’ being accomplished by volunteers and faith based groups. Five years in and we are still a city racially divided four ways from Sunday.
Do you want to talk about drugs and violence? Want to know the murder statistics and how we are still highest per capita in the country? Don’t get me started.
Five years in and we’re still the country’s step-child; should another storm or disaster occur we will still be crying ‘po mouf’ to our neighbors. We are still in no position to offer succor to others should they need us. The great American city.
Five years in and we wouldn’t live anywhere else in the whole damn hemisphere and although our optimism flags at times, we are here for the long haul; we are among others that feel the same. At our home we pay private recyclers; our neighbor composts. I work the voting polls and participate in the process in which we elect our officials, I reserve the right to bitch about our inequities. We have a new mayor and hopefully our city is on its way to a better future: physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually.
There is a philosophy that tells you that only by your cognition does the universe actually exist and that when you close your eyes it no longer does; that when you put your head down for the final sleep it will be gone. Poof. In the meantime all that happens is illusion spurred ahead by greed; the grand scheme that goes on within you and without you is here for your temporary education, enlightenment and transcendence.
That existential crap only goes so far until you may realize that, even if true, you have this one life to live; that you still bleed when cut, that you still cry when hurt and that you still are inclined to live a full, happy, productive and honorable existence. Even though it appears, at times, that the cards are stacked against us; even though we take pistol whippings by the fates; even though when the going gets tough(er) we are inclined to get going. To experience New Orleans is to experience love; for me, to live here is to want to make it better.
“The minute you let her under your skin, then you begin to make it better”
“The minute you let her into your heart, then you can start to make it better”
To be continued…