New Orleans, pt. 1

I lived in New Orleans from 1994 to 1997. I haven't set foot in the city nor in the state of Louisiana since the day after my graduation from law school. It's not that I hated living there (because I got over that feeling in 1995), but I just haven't had a reason to go back.

I wish I had been back before now because I am heart broken by what I've seen on the news. The city and the vibrancy that I loved are now submerged under chest high water from the river and the lake. It will be years before the city recovers.

On Monday, I listened to some commentary on the radio as Katrina made landfall, and conventional wisdom was that New Orleans had dodged another big storm. Katrina had veered eastward, so her impact would largely be felt along the Gulf Coast, in Mississippi and Alabama. New Orleans would get some heavy rain (so flooding was inevitable), but it would survive.

Michael Wilbon suggested that if the hurricane had in fact hit New Orleans directly, the city would be washed away like the fictional island of Atlantis. As everyone now knows, New Orleans is below sea level, and the only thing that protects the city from the Mississippi on the west and Lake Ponchatrain on the east is the levee system. Initially, the worse case scenario was thought to be a direct hit from the hurricane, but instead, it was the breached levee.

I remember the first New Orleans flood I lived through. It was during my first year of law school, and it was during the beginning of hurricaine season. I think it was Andrew and we endured a few days of knee high water and no power. As the rain fell, I was safely tucked away on the third floor of my apartment building. A few of my exams were rescheduled, and our brand new law school got about a foot of water in its lobby. A couple of weeks later, everybody went home and life returned to normal.

Because we were students, we had nothing of value to lose. And if we did lose something valuable, we had the means to replace it. My best friend lost her car, so her parents got her another one. My downstairs neighbors lost some of their furniture, so they simply set it out in the trash, gave notice and sought apartments above the ground.

So I have mixed emotions about what I see on TV. When I saw the scores of people being ushered into the Superdome on Sunday night, I kept wondering why they didn't just leave. There was advance warning that this might be the big one, so it would make sense that everyone should have high-tailed it out of there. Then I began to remember what life was like for certain segments of the city, and it was clear to me that when you have very little to begin with, you hold onto it because it is your entire world.

I am upset about the slow response, pissed about the chaos, and irked by suggestions that race should not be mentioned as a factor. How else can we explain the slow response and references to looting and pillaging? Race is a large issue, and it is the issue that New Orleanians themselves have avoided for far too long. This is a city that acts ashamed of itself. Tourists see the French Quarter and the Garden District and marvel at how beautiful things are. No one ventures into the ninth ward, not even by accident, because to do so is to be confronted with the most squalid and hopeless conditions. It would seem totally unimaginable in the US in the 21st Century, but it is no different than the scene at the Superdome now. These people have always been desparate, so the hurricane only highlighted the problem.

I am venting because this whole situation has gotten me emotional. When I lived in New Orleans, I got defensive when the suburbanites referred to the city in animalistic terms or when people made overtly racist comments about city residents. I've had similar reactions to the media coverage of this situation. Yet when I lived in the city, I lived in the Garden District, went to school Uptown, and limited my contact with the depressed areas of the city, for fear that I would end up victimized. If I ventured too many blocks off the main drags, I was in another world, places so hopeless and desperate that I did like everybody else and buried my head in the sand. When it was time to graduate, it was a no brainer--I had options so I left for higher ground.

From my perch on higher ground in DC, it is easy second-guess the thought process of those who stayed. I have no doubt that I would have been among the first to evacuate. Call it common sense, but I call it the luxury of having options...