They said what?!?!
Like everyone in New Orleans I have friends and family out of town. It�s been brought to my attention that some of these people are having a very specific kind of hard time. They are almost constantly being confronted with people who find that faced with someone from New Orleans is the perfect time to share their criticisms and abstract questions about all the issues facing New Orleans. This can be difficult. At least being in New Orleans there is a sense of community and for nearly every person that�s feeling down and buckling under the strain and stress, there is at least one person around to pull them out of it a little. This is very helpful. It�s helped me on more than one occasion.
I keep getting phone calls from people asking for advice on how to handle the criticisms and other, sometime ignorantly uninformed comments when there�s no one around from New Orleans that can lend perspective to the whole thing. My advice has ranged from �fuck�em, they don�t matter� to �well, then set them straight�. In the end though, it seems like just being able to talk about it with someone who might understand helps more than anything. With that in mind, I thought I�d post some of the things I�ve been told are being said and see if anyone else out there is hearing similar things. If so, how did you handle it?
Here�s a short list:
Why are you here in [insert location here] if your home was in Louisiana?
Do you ever want to go back?
There’s a lot of crime down there, huh?
I bet you’re glad to be up here?
I’m sorry about the Hurricane, but I’m happy to have you are here.
I bet you could make some money down in New Orleans in Real Estate. Oh, wait, they were a bunch of crap homes that were destroyed anyway.
I don’t know what the appeal is. Why would anyone want to live there?
Why don’t those people just move out so we can bomb the place?
If the town wasn�t so full of sinners then God wouldn�t have done that to you.
The only reason people choose to live there is because they can�t make it anywhere else.
As long as the French Quarter is alright, who cares about the rest of it? That�s where all the money is anyway.
The city should have never existed to begin with. It�s just nature correcting things.
As you can see, some of the questions are genuine and sincere while others just seem like bait for a fight. Feel free to share some of your own interactions with people, how you handled it, and how it worked out. Is it possible to change peoples� minds when they feel strongly that New Orleans isn�t worth the money to rebuild? Is it possible to convince someone who may have never even stepped foot in New Orleans that there�s something worth saving? I�m not really sure. If people aren�t using proof, experience, or logic to construct their opinions, I�m not sure you can use those things to change their minds. But what I am sure of is that sharing these experiences will help others out there trying to get by until they can get back home.
Related posts:
Some perspective from where I sit (Atlanta native, grew up in Baton Rouge, lots of NOLA friends and connections, wish they had a bumper sticker that says “New Orleans - Proud To Call It Somewhere I Care About”, back in Atlanta for 14 years).
People who know nothing about New Orleans try to apply the logic of places they do know, and that usually doesn’t work. You all know the issues of poverty, geography, economics and the like are different down there.
I think the general perception is that poor, black people lost everything and they all lived in public housing. People don’t get the notion of a house that’s been in a poor black family for 100 years, so it’s owned by them but they don’t have money for insurance, house payments, etc. And they don’t understand the no-income lifestyle a lot of the poor in New Orleans live. “Get a job” is an easy reaction, but hardly applies in a lot of instances.
Likewise, most people assume wealthier, whiter people all live Uptown or in the suburbs and weren’t flooded out.
And those are just the base issues. The dynamics of New Orleans - lots of small, independent restaurants, shops and businesses that need customers and employees they don’t have, a delicate economy that most people depend on, and obviously the importance of the city and why it’s located on such a delicate perch - are just way beyond the comprehension of most of America.
And thus dumb questions.
I think the best the city can hope for from the outside are tourist dollars in the mid-term and to lobby the hell out of the government for better hurricane protection. You’re on your own beyond that, so people who care need to identify opportunities and shape the future of the city.
Yeah — we’ve heard all those questions and others. And the most strident opinions (like many we’ve seen in this forum over the past three months) have been from those who a) have never been here or b) those who never left the French Quarter. Nearly all of the obnoxiousness has come from folks who live in these white-bread suburbs with cookie-cutter houses. I always laugh when they bring up this crapola about the poor being the ones mostly affected. If anything in this city has ever been equal-opportunity, it’s been Katrina.
That’s not to say everyone who lives in that kind of world doesn’t Get It. Some of the biggest kindnesses we’ve been shown have come from people who literally live across the street from those who have been hardest to take. But what I’m saying is I hear very little criticism or dumb questions from people in New York City, in Florida, Charleston or California — all places that have faced their own large-scale disasters in recent years or know they might be next on the Big List.
I wouldn’t waste my time trying to convince anyone of anything. Until they come drive through Lakeview/Gentilly/Lower 9th/Plaquemines/NO East/St. Bernard/the entire Mississippi coast, they’re not going to believe you anyway. To them, we’re just a bunch of whiners with our hands out.
I did get some guff from some useless fuck in California. I was sitting in a little dive bar outside of long Beach and the two ex-presidents were on talking about the money they’d raised and where it was going. The bartender’d asked if I was in town on business, where I’m from, etc. Then this hack chimes in with something like ‘People shouldn’t even live there but if they’re going to then they should back-fill the whole area up to sea level and then put up levees’. My response was,’but its something like 36 square miles’- at least. Which evokded: ‘Well, then people shouldn’t live there. Its just stupid to live there and you all deserve what you get’. Well, that’s just too much so I said ‘That’s an awefully big statement for someone who lives on a Fucking Fault Line! So I guess the next time your shit gets all shaken up like a can of soda and falls down then, by your own thinking, you deserve it.’
At that point it seemed clear we were one or two more statements from a fist-fight in the parking lot so we both just kind of let it go and didn’t talk anymore. Thinking back on it and the look on his face, it ocurred to me that some of peoples’ opinions are based in the fact that its just too real. In this case, throwing it into his backyard seemed to raise a fear masked in anger more than a real anger. I think if people really think about it, everywhere has it’s own dangers but like here, they sort of ignore it until they can’t anymore. Whether it’s mudslides, wild fires and earthquakes, to huge volcanoes posing as Yosimite National Park, to tornados tearing the ass out of the midwest to deadly cold tempuratures in the North East…etc. And if you wanna think you really live somewhere safe from that kind of thing then you still have to contend with a meteor the size of Delaware smashing the fuck out of everything. This false sense of security that most people live with starts to break down when there are disasters on such scale so they start the whole ‘there’s something wrong with there’ or ‘there’s something wrong with them’ so they can continue to believe nothing like that could ever happen to them.
I don’t think you can break down the lies that people tell themselves so they can be relatively happy in their day to day lives. At base, its a survival mechanism of the brain. I remember a philosophy professor telling me once (he was drunk as hell at the time) that even if God himself came down and announced that he does not exist, there are still people who would continue to believe in God - they simply have to - it isn’t a choice. And on a personal note, I’ve always loved drinking with philosophy professors.
Growing up in the Cold War, we were told of constant threats of immediate destruction from Nuclear War. There were a few years there after the Cold War where we didn’t get that constant onslaught of fear. Then, after 911 it seems that fear mentality is stronger than ever. Maybe people need that fear, or maybe the gov’t needs us to be afraid - there’s a lot of ways to speculate on it but none of it means much.
The reason I dedicated my personal blog to being about New Orleans is to provide news and education to New Orleanians (displaced or not) and the rest of the world that gets all of their information from the major news network, which provide more disaster-tainment than not.
What are these people supposed to think when, for example, CNN plays and re-plays accounts of doctor-assisted suicides in hospitals while not spending an ounce of attention on the many other doctors who gave of themselves and some killed themselves in the end because they couldn’t take the misery any more?
It is our solemn duty as New Orleanians to respond, not so much in kind, but in defense of our town. If it is their right to spout bullshit, it is your right AND responsibility to set them straight. Too often, we don’t say anything out of politeness or fatigue, or even go so far as to turn the other cheek. Tell them what they don’t know. Yes, it is possible to change people’s minds through personal accounts, reason and appealing to the fact that not everyone is an idiot. If you don’t say anything, they will continue to think crap about New Orleans and, even worse, spread these horrible rumors and opinions that they got from equally uninformed sources.
You are New Orleans. You have every right to be New Orleans. Go for it.
“If people aren
Can I ask a slightly unrelated question please?
How many people died during the entire 2005 Hurricane saison?
All the way through Epsilon.
Laurie
That’s a good question Laurie. I don’t think anyone knows yet - they say it may be years before there’s a final number. It sounds like the kind of thing that someone should know. It sounds like the kind of thing that would be easy to google. There’s something sad about that.
When people make comments to the effect of “Katrina was god’s way of punishing a sinful city,” I like to point out that the populations that fared best during the storm were (a) gay men, and (b) transsexuals–since most of us live in the Marigny/Bywater, the Quarter, or Uptown. So, as I believe I’ve said earlier, either the god of which they speak really has it in for lower- and middle-class heterosexual families (plus a few lesbians in Mid-City), or he’s got really shitty aim.
I swear the next person that says to me, well the city is below sea level, what did they expect, is going to get punched in the face. I heard that a lot when I first got here. Why would you want to live in a hurricane area, why below sea level. First the entire city isn’t below sea freakin’ level and two, you can’t live anywhere without some sort of natural disaster. And when I point out that there are tornadoes here, that seems to shut most of them up. I really want to take someone’s head off. It just shows how ignorant and outright mean people are.