let me start this with a heartfelt thank you to my family. when i changed my flight yesterday so i get to fort worth earlier and disrupted their planning they didn’t bat an eyelash. in fact, i was welcomed home with sushi and the chance to play with both of my nieces.
even so, i’m homeless and i know it.
not in the wandering way that i get a kick out of for months at a stretch – when everything is new and exciting and i’m learning about the world. rather, i’m the kind of homeless that is blessed to have a roof and food and all sorts of extra amenaties, but is the “guest” no matter how welcomed and loved. and i am both.
i am homeless in the sense that i don’t have a place to unpack my bags. in fact i don’t have one place to put all of my bags. i’m homeless (and now phoneless) in that this is all just temporary until i figure out what next.
I guess you could say I rode the fence on this one. A funny thing to say for anyone that knows me because I’m notorious for being – shall we say impassioned – about everything. I’m rarely at a loss of opinion.
But when the footage of “looting” in new orleans started making its way through the media I couldn’t firmly stand on any one side and not see quite clearly the other. For instance, I understood people going into grocery stores and taking food, or into clothing stores and taking shoes…if a wizard of oz type storm whisked your whole life into lake pontchatrain…or more to the truth…turned your home into an extension of lake pantchatrain, you have legitimate needs for sustenance and coverings.
On the flip however, I had little tolerance for folks breaking into electronic stores to steal big screen tvs that they neither had dry place to store or electricity to run. But I digress.
In both cases I also understand the need to attempt order even in times of such hopeless chaos. One of my fellow volunteers – a firefighter- was discussing mob mentality this morning. How their ladder (read fire truck) was responding to a fire but got caught up in a mob of people who, just for giggles, were rocking the truck. I need you to think about 1250 gallons of water and four firefighters trying to get to flames to put them out and a bunch of folks rocking it back and forth back and forth on the verge of tipping it over. Just for giggles.
That’s what a mob can do. It can go from a good time to a bad time. Or in the case of a city in ruins, a bad time to a nightmare simply because it becomes ok for people to not do what they would normally do. Think real life Lord of the Flies.
So there’s that side.
And then there’s my side.
After weeks of agonizing over how much water my street got and how high above sea level I really am imagine my roller coaster of a ride to discover that although my apartment was high enough to escape flood waters it was just accessible enough for looters.
Once again I’m torn.
I can accept that people kicked in my door in search of a higher drier place. I’m even excited that the food and water I bought when I thought I wasn’t going to evacuate, was useful to someone (trust me, they ate and ate well).
What I don’t understand is how eating my food somehow turned into throwing my bed out my French doors and over the balcony. Searching for money I understand a little bit, but throwing my clothes all over the floor not so much. Going through my closets, maybe; stealing my stereo and a large amount of my cds, less.
And I don’t own that much – mobile as I am I can pack up my life in the back of a u-haul. So when I think of families. People who’ve been where they are their whole lives, who’ve had children and grandchildren run through the rooms. People who’ve scrimped and saved for every piece of furniture, every tv and radio, every dollar that might be hidden under a mattress. People who’ve passed down furniture and jewelry with sentimental as well as monetary value.
So when people talk about how awful it is to worry about stuff…what a waste of time it is to keep order, I think of those people. People who left everything and came back to nothing, not from an act of nature but from an act of humans at their least humane.
Tags: katrina, me-ness, neworleans, soapbox
this is where i’m trying to get to…check this out.
Tags: travel
this morning on the way to boutte, the sun bright and yesterday’s clouds scattered and forced to the fringes of the sky, we followed a caravan of trucks hauling cages of would-be-garbage if…
“there goes someone’s house.”
lee danced with the truth on that one. each truck was an assortment of carpet and foundation debris, mattresses and flying papers. truck after truck for a mile. wind wipping their contents into a frenzy and sometimes blowing them free onto the street.
a mile headed to the smoldering trash heap behind a fringe of surviving trees. a mile of sorrow that – even in its magnitude – is only this morning’s sorrow.
today i smiled at people again. not the smile i paste up because i don’t want them to see me looking sad when they already have so much to deal with…but the real smile. anyone who knows me knows the one i’m referring to…all 187 teeth (big as they are) exposed to the whole world. and when i joked i was joking with them because i was lighter than i’ve been in quite a few weeks.
now i’m torn – does my new found lightheartedness mean i should extend and try to offer this up to more folks for a longer period of time, or is my excitement because i’m homebound in 3 days.
funny, there is a country song called 3 days…”i got three days to wash the road out my soul, i got three days to love you out of control and i wish i had a life time to love you this way – loving you freely for just three days…” or something like that. but i digress.
i also got good news that i should be able to buy a sim card to go into my grandfather’s phone for $25 bucks…my same number and everything. so send in those numbers so i can input you into my new phone once i get home.
i wish i had something more profound to say…i could go there but it would make me sad so i’ll stick with my happy day, be contented that some $2000 checks seem to be trickling down from fema (federal employees missing in action!), and counting down the last two work days i have left here.
by the way – i found a place…rather my friend directed me toward a place…in guatemala for spanish. i think it is a go and now all i’m looking for is a reasonable ticket there. four weeks (maybe 5) in guatemala and i should have a solid grasp on spanish…and a renewed outlook on life in general.
my mother and father are amazing people. everything good about me i owe to them…their love…their attention…their prayers for me and who they wanted me to become. i’ll claim what’s wrong as my own faltering but the good i give to them.
in that vein my wonderful parents drove 6 hours to new orleans yesterday and rummaged through my looted apartment to help me pick up pieces of my life that were strewn about. they loaded up the truck, had a quick lunch (bearing oreos that my co-workers enjoyed immensely!) and then promptly got back in the car before 3pm to make the drive back to houston.
now they are storing my stuff again…as they have been forced to do on and off for the past few years.
how do i say thank you…i guess it would be to find a place of my own and stop storing stuff at their house. but if they are annoyed they never let on. instead they gave me the hugs i desperately need, joked with me to fight back the tears, and braved the long road home.
if anyone wonders what love looks like, please take a good look into the face of my parents – trust me, you’ll understand then.
Spell bananas b-a-n-a-n-a-s…I never realized what the heck dear gwen was saying in that song. Having heard it all night and day yesterday I’m even less sure what she means. But then how much does meaning mean when you are busy dancing your heart out in the middle of the always foul-smelling but bordering on unbearably funky French quarter.
Yep, it’s open. It is limted to mostly burboun street, known for its strip houses, transvestites and basic carnal delights…drinking and general debauchery. Its reputation has not been notably changed by water and misery of the city at large.
And as long as I’ve been in new orleans the trickle of people has thickened. The street signs we used to ignore, because the chance of anyone being on the streets was far less than our need to get to where we were headed, are now blinking traffic lights and traffic is creeping along congested streets.
Don’t get me wrong, the place isn’t hopping like in days of old. But if you want to park in the quarter for dinner at the redfish grill (the only place I’ve found so far that isn’t in Metairie or beyond) or shaking your butt at utopia (as we all did last night) you face the same issues you always face in the quarter – trying to park.
So last night we piled into a few cars, parked at the quarter’s edge and hoofed it to a few bars. The first a loud place with a band doing covers of songs like “the summer of ‘69” too loud to hear each other and too mellow to dance, we moved to a former haunt (former in terms of the only other place we’d spent any time in the last 20 or so days).
Our previous night out we helped make up a handful of people that had the floor the bar and the music to ourselves. Last night it was evident that new orleans, in some form, was fattening up…with people.
The dj was bad…he had about 7 songs he played all night long. The drinks were scary…shots in test tubes licked and then put in the cleavage or tucked in the shorts of some – shall we say interesting looking women – and then a face pushed down to retrieve them. The crowd unruly…we had people in desperate need of a room of their own (it went beyond public displays of affection…I’m talking random body parts breaking free of clothing and enough gyration to make jerry springer blush).
It was like the French quarter of old. Simultaneously a reassuring and terrifying concept.
But we sweated to the music that seemed to be a labor for the dj to produce. The guys fought off frightening men that tried to grope and corner us. And overall we had a wonderful time. To hot and tired to think about much beyond being hot and tired.
And at the end…hanging out with a friend and enjoying normal conversation abut life and love…saying goodbye (the reason we were partying) to two of the firemen that have become if not family – definitely friends…it was almost normal. At least if felt that way.
Tags: fema, friends, katrina, neworleans
Tags: squids
so today i’ll try to talk about something different. something wonderful. like how when we evacuated for rita a friend and i went to a restaurant to have drinks (a favorite of mine from when i used to recruit there). the rain was coming down in torrents, the sky a forboding gray, and even in the heat of south louisiana in september it was cool.
the bar had a fire blazing so we crouched close to the fire and ordered drinks and oysters and struck up conversation with the couple across from us. they asked where we were from…which led to why we were there. they seemed genuinely interested. and more than that, appreciative of our efforts no matter how bungled by fema.
we chatted for a while – an hour or two. and as they rose to leave we settled in for a little longer as we contemplated dinner. preparing to get a table we went to pay our tab. the waitress smiled and nodded us on.
“they paid for you. they said you have been working really hard.” another big smile as we walked away pleasantly surprised and quite moved by the gesture.
we were seated, had an awesome waiter who brought us two soups instea of one, brought us sorbet between courses and generally took awesome care of us. it was a welcome reprieve from the sometimes emotionally grueling though beauracratic work of processing fokls through the fema system.
sometimes i get lost in sad stories – like the woman today who lost her daughter yesterday and then found out she wasn’t getting her $2000 as promised or the woman who was verbally abused by the red cross and vented to me for 20 minutes even though she knew i couldn’t help her with her $2000 either.
sometimes i get lost in all of that and forget that a couple bought me drinks and an appitizer. or that people who have lost so much compliment me on my smile while i work, or that an applicant sat waiting to be in my line yesterday (wrong line) and told me he liked my natural style, or that my friend has taken better care of me than i’ve taken of myself these last three weeks…
so i want to take this moment to say that i do see slivers of Blue. and if i sometimes seem blind to them, know they are just clouded by tears and when i dry them i see more clearly.
much love for all the support…
Democrats Attack Radio Host’s Remarks on Crime
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
Published: September 30, 2005, New York Times
WASHINGTON, Sept. 29 – William J. Bennett, the former Republican
secretary of education, came under fire from Democratic Congressional leaders on
Thursday for comments he made on a radio program about the potential
for reducing crime by aborting all black children.
“I do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you
could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this
country, and your crime rate would go down,” Mr. Bennett, now a radio
talk show host, said in a broadcast earlier this week. “That would be an
impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your
crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching,
extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky.”
In a radio broadcast on Thursday, Mr. Bennett called the criticism of
him “ridiculous, stupid, totally without merit” and said his critics had
taken his comments out of context.
“I was pointing out that abortion should not be opposed for economic
reasons, any more than racism or for that matter slavery or segregation
should be supported or opposed for economic reasons,” he said. “Immoral
policies are wrong because they are wrong, not because of an economic
calculation. One could just as easily have said you could abort all
children and prevent all crime, to show the absurdity of the proposition.”
Mr. Bennett, who was the secretary of education in the Reagan
administration and is the author of a best-selling book on morality, said he was
referring to a debate in the online magazine Slate that had discussed race in the
context of an argument about whether abortions contributed to lowering
the crime rate. That debate, involving Steven D. Levitt, an author of the
best-seller “Freakonomics,” apparently appeared in Slate six years ago.
In an interview with Fox News, Mr. Bennett said critics had distorted
his comments by omitting his statement that aborting all black babies would
be “morally reprehensible.”
“When that is included in the quote, it makes it perfectly clear what
my position is,” Mr. Bennett said, “They make it seem as if I am
supporting such a monstrous idea, which I don’t.”
The Democratic Congressional leaders, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada and
Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, both sought to put the
remarks in the context of a Republican effort to court African-American voters.
Mr. Reid said Mr. Bennett’s comments would “feed the fires of racism,” and
Ms. Pelosi called them “shameful words.”
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Tags: soapbox
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