New Orleans

Both times I've been down to New Orleans and come back, people ask me "how was it?"

What do you say?

"Good?" It's not good. It's bad. "Meaningful?" Yes, it is that to go down there and work. But I still feel like a poverty tourist because the amount of money I've spent on plane tickets, meals, and accommodations is vast compared with the value I've given in return. I've had a meaningful experience, but have I helped to create a better New Orleans?

I tend to tell people who ask "how was it?" 2 things:

1) I say that I learned a lot and had a powerful experience.
2) I say that I got to spend time with and make friendships with people who also feel invested in seeing the city restored.

I tend to leave it there.

I know that's lame... but both times I've left the city feeling like I've witnessed something unique and tragic, a "perfect storm" of nature's cruel whimsy tearing apart the predictably fragile human safety net that the government and markets create for our nation's citizens, especially the poor.

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I've taken groups from church down to New Orleans the last two years. The first was in July '06, the second was in March '07. I've gotten a chance to see large parts of the city on both trips. This photo is from the Lower 9th Ward, near the site of the levee break, taken on the second trip. As many who have been will attest, the sight of square miles of neighborhoods decimated and abandoned is overwhelming. The second visit, I felt like I could see improvement. More repairs, more crap cleaned up, more business activity--especially small businesses in the neighborhoods farther from the central business district. But even with the improvements, there's still way too much of the same--boarded up houses, eviscerated communities limping along in a state of limbo. It was clear that there just wasn't enough money in people's bank accounts for people to come back and re-build, but they hadn't given up and turned over mortgages, either.

This limbo created a kind of existential challenge for our work crews, who "gutted" houses both times, stripping down the house to the studs, in the hopes that the owner will find the money to rebuild. But there's no guarantee such rebuilding will ever happen. Many homeowners who lost homes weren't sufficiently insured. Many are STILL paying mortgages on homes that they don't live in in neighborhoods where safety, running water, and electricity may or may not be present. So as volunteers, while you've just busted your ass over two days to clear out a house, there's absolutely no guarantee the owner will ever occupy the premises again. And yet, if the houses DON'T get gutted, they automatically turn over to the government and/or private developers who are snatching up parcels.

There are many ways to "interpret" Katrina. I found post-Katrina New Orleans decidedly opaque and uninterpretable. I'm not down with the conspiracy camp (although I love the way Kanye threw down what so many people were thinking): I'm even suspicious about Al Gore's claim (now embraced by the liberal NPR-listening masses) that global warming caused warmer waters in the Gulf and thus, Katrina.

And yet, to take a "levee tour" of New Orleans, as I did the second time down there, is to see in stark ways how the levees that protect the poor sections of the city like the Lower and Upper 9th Wards are paper thin compared to the massive earthworks that protect the communities with higher property values and whiter constituencies. For me, it opens up all kinds of questions about the financing, design, and maintenance of public works. How does everything that's publicly owned get paid for? How does bonding and insurance affect public utilities and infrastructure? The racism that's evident in New Orleans is so deeply embedded in complex bureaucratic processes, that someone can visit there and see the damage and KNOW that something failed and that the black residents of the city got screwed--but exactly how they got screwed, and by whom is a much tougher question to answer.

It feels too simple to me to blame Bush and "Brownie"--they're the easy targets and their failures the most visible--and people have the most to gain politically by harping on the Bush administration's failures. But the failures in New Orleans by local Democratic leadership were at least as egregious as the administration's. The answer to the question "why" goes far deeper than partisanship.

Another question I was left with--on both trips--was the question of the government's ultimate responsibility in times of tragedy and hardship. What is the government obligated to provide its citizens? This question is much larger than Katrina, but you see it there. You see the depth of resiliency in the survivors and it's hard not to think that the resiliency that emerges from hardship ultimately strengthens and improves a person's character. Is the government supposed to nurture and stimulate the emergence of that "bootstrap" kind of character? How can the government possibly be expected to remunerate losses on this kind of scale? These are questions of safety nets and services, but they're also questions of will and spirit and faith.