New Orleans: The Prodigal Child

Cities are the product of their inhabitants. The DNA of a city is a complex combination of varying socioeconomic strata. The charm of a city, let’s take New Orleans as an example, is a sum of different parts. Pre-Katrina New Orleans’ charm was found in both its po’ boy’s blues AND its affluent Mardi Gras balls. The city is the offspring of its inhabitants- the rich and the poor. The city is the child; its inhabitants are its parents, who are charged with taking care of it.
Today I babysat New Orleans, driving through Gentilly, the 9th Ward, and Lakeview.
Newsflash to the world: NEW ORLEANS IS NOT BETTER.
New Orleans is still a very sick child. The patriarch of the family, the white upper-crust of Uptown, and the mother, the poor blacks of the flooded East side, have split up. They had their problems through their long marriage -- from the days of slavery to the mobs of the early 1900s – but they managed to live together in a turbulent sort of “peace.” Then the tempestuous Katrina swept the rug out from under them, exposing what had been swept beneath all those years – the dust of racial and social discrimination and strife.
Nagin has said “New Orleans is back.”
Bush has promised “one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen.”
As I drove through streets, deserted save the odd car every five minutes, these statements were exposed as the lies they are. Unless the largest reconstruction effort the world has seen consists of a few crews in plastic body suits trying to clean thousands of homes with a few trucks and port-o-potties.
The poor of the city, a majority of African-Americans, who could not evacuate were swept up and battered, by nature and by their own national government. Eight months later, they are trying to show a happy face, like a battered wife, pretending like everything is better. Everything is not better, and the child has been left by both parents, to fend for itself. When the bustle of the French Quarter is put in relief against the silent state of the flood-damaged part of the city, the busy sounds of tourism, jazz, and the French Market have an eerie, forced quality.
A walk through the French Quarter could convince anyone new to the city that things have gotten better, even close to normal. Stores are open, tourists are stumbling around drunk, the smell of urine is strong on Bourbon- but to those familiar with the city, something is off. There is a feeling that you can’t put your finger on, a sickness, whose symptoms include occasional lumber-boarded windows, a dirty line that stretches horizontal across the entire city, and a vague feeling of malaise.
The city’s father has turned the other cheek- some say believing the problem no longer exists, others say waiting for an “ethnic cleansing by inaction.” Its mother is drowning in her own problems, too busy and too weak to be able to lift up herself, much less her ailing child.
The seeming hopelessness of it all has me wanting to scream. To scream so loud that the whole nation wakes up sweating and runs to the aid of this abandoned child. I think Jesus and George would both agree: no child left behind. Not even the sinful, poor, dirty ones.
New Orleans is an orphan, and the whole nation is waiting to see who will step forward and take charge.
Every passing week leaves the city less and less inhabitable. Nobody deserves this.
We can’t wait.