Wet Bank Guide

What was it like to be a college student volunteering to spend Spring break cleaning out houses in New Orleans only to find the remains of a very young girl and a woman perhaps her grandmother huddled together in a ruined house, seven months after?

The newspapers don't tell us, because it was not an exceptional occurrence. As the headline moved by the Reuters News Agency summaries, Grim Find Shows Normalcy Still Eludes New Orleans.

We are not OK.

S.O.S. Katrina We Are Not OK is one of my favorite blog titles, and blogger Dangle's everyman chronicle of the disaster is a compelling view into not just the disaster, but one locals' visceral reaction to it. Almost everyone who blogs about New Orleans has made it their theme at one point or another, although I have not. What they try to say, in their particular stories of it all, is that we are not OK>

New Orleans author and blogger Poppy Z. Brite took up this same theme this week in an online community, offering her own summary of why We Are Not OK.

Occasionally I'm asked by friends Not From Here, "New Orleans is better now, right? You had Mardi Gras!" or "Are you doing OK?" or some variation. Sometimes, particularly if they're contemplating a visit, I even try to reassure them: it's very possible to have a good, safe time here; the French Quarter is fine; lots of restaurants and bars are open. In truth, though, New Orleans and most of its inhabitants are very much Not OK. I present to you a baker's dozen facts about life in the city seven months after the storm. Some are large, some small. I think many of them will surprise you...

No, we are not OK, New Orleans is not OK. It is a disaster zone after seven months. The current 200,000 residents are the walking wounded, many with a dangerously glassy eyed disconnection, others erupting routinely in anger. Those not crammed into tiny apartments or several families to a house on the Island--the sliver by the river of high land--are camping in the ruins of gutted homes without electricity or potable water. Another several hundred thousands remained scattered around the country with their lives in tatters. In Calcasieu parish there are still people living in tents. Mississippi along the coast is not much different from the pictures the world saw of the tsunami of Xmas 2004.

I am still living 1,200 miles away, and don't find much time as a single parent packing a house up to go to chitchat with people about New Orleans, or my imminent move back . Few ask why I would move back, and it surprises me. I take it to mean that they think things on the coast really are OK, that New Orleans is getting back to normal.

Things are not getting back to normal. I no longer read my local paper, except as I take copies and crumble pages into boxes and around things to move, but I read the Times Picayune on line every day. I know I am moving home to a place where the levees may or may not hold in the next storm, where homeowners insurance rates are skyrocketing if you can even get insurance, where the price of a dry home is almost ruinous, where because the government refuses to offer the same aid to the local utility they gladly gave ConEd after 9-11 I worry how we might pay a utility bill that could double what they were in the past.

I am taking my family, including my children, to a city over half of which is an empty wasteland of ruined homes, dark as the country at night because much of the city has no electricity, where the U.S. Government after seven months has not re-established reliable mail service even to the dry and secure parts of town, where garbage collection is not a routine but a cause for neighborhood celebration.

Why? I want people to ask me, why would I do this? I am going because we are not OK. And I am going because you don't ask anymore, whether you just don't want to know or because you have heard we are OK.

I am going home because the central government is trying to turn us into a needy interest group, and turn their back on their obligation to aid us, because it increasingly looks like we will be on our own. Remember that the vast majority of damage in New Orleans was the result of the failure of levees the Corps of Engineers, which knew were substandard and not up to the task. Because we have such a clear claim upon billions in compensation the government don't wish to pay, they must turn us into a something alien and undeserving.

We are not. Members of needy welfare groups don't work eight hours a day then return to a home that is bare studs inside to spend another six or eight hours working on their ruined homes by lantern light. They don't stand in line for hours to collect their mail so they can pay their bills on time because the post office won't resume regular deliveries, or spend their free time cleaning the parks and boulevards (we call them "neutral grounds"), or helping the elderly clean out their homes.

Needy welfare dependents don't willing go into the stink and the ruin in a place where one routinely finds the decayed remains of the dead.

These people are of a kind that the descendants of the hardy pioneers of North Dakota, where I now live, should understand. I am going because I have to be with them. I have to do what I can to save my city, the city I grew up in, the only city of a half dozen I've lived in that I've ever loved. I have to go to help prove that southerners in general and Orleanians in particular are not the grasshoppers among the American ants; we are the people who rebuilt after the civil war, the flood of 1927, the terrible hurricanes of the past.

I am going home to live among people who know that we are not OK. Every week, I hear or read something that cause me to boil up in a paroxysm of anger. This week's installment occurred when a local United States Senator announced an aid package for farmers, telling the local media that if we were spending billions on the Gulf Coast, we must not forget the farmers in North Dakota. Every county in the state was declared a disaster area at some point last year, he reminded us, and they want their cut of the money.

Disaster? I shouted out at the radio, pounding on the steering wheel. How could he dare compare the annual routine of too much or not enough rain, of wind and hail to what happened to the Gulf Coast? How many bodies did they pull out of homes last week in North Dakota, Senator? How many people are still living in tents or tin trailers seventh months after their "disaster"? Is half the population of your state (about the same size as the population of pre-flood New Orleans) living in another state, everything they own lost and owing a mortgage on a ruined home for which insurance will not pay? How many people are suffering traumatic stress disorder? One hundred thousand? Two hundred thousand?

Calm down, I reminded my self. Breathe. I went home and furiously packed boxes, in the adrenaline frenzy I had long ago when I dropped my motor bike on the Greater New Orleans Bridge and was almost run over by a semi, then went home and painted half my apartment in a night.

I'm not just angry at clueless congressmen from far away. I'm angry at our own, at our clueless mayor who turned away a bid to pay the city to haul away the tens of thousands of ruined cars in favor of one that will cost tens of millions, on the theory that FEMA would reimburse us. I'm angry at the Archdiocese of New Orleans, which sent armed guards into a mass at the city's (perhaps the nation's) oldest parish founded by blacks, to protect their not very popular spokesman and an out of parish priest from parishioners who sat in the pews holding protest signs and singing We Shall Not Be Moved to protest the closing of their parish.

We are not OK.

I need to live among people who know we are not OK, people who share the same anger and despair. I need to find a way to turn that anger into energy to rebuild a city, a culture, a way of life. That's why I'm going back to live just blocks from vacant neighborhoods of rubble and ruin. If I were to stay in Fargo, the anger and frustration will surely kill me.

Not everyone can go home. We have the resources (just barely) to afford it. My children are bright enough to get into the decent magnet or charter schools in a city where the school system was a disaster before the flood. We don't have a mortgage on a slab that was once a home hanging over our heads.

The people who are scattered from Austin to Atlanta, the ones who can't go home because they cannot afford it, because their jobs in New Orleans were lost with their homes and everything they owned, or because they are afraid, you need to tell your new neighbors and co-workers: we are not OK.

We need to tell everyone who will listen that this is not an abstract fight over how many zeroes can dance on the crown of a pinheaded appropriations committee member, that we are not just another needy interest group begging for money, this is not a debate over whether we shall or shall not have a new Super Wal-Mart in our neighborhood. It is a battle for the soul of our city, and a battle for the soul of America.

We are not OK, but tens of thousands more are coming home each month anyway--evacuees and ex pats alike. We are coming home to save the soul of our city, to do what we can to ensure a unique way of life and three hundred years of history are not lost to neglect or Disney-inspired "redevelopment". We are coming home knowing the rest of America seems unprepared to pay the cost, ready to do it alone if we must.

We can't save the soul of America. Only the rest of the country can do that. If they turn their back on New Orleans, if they refuse to pay the just compensation for the criminal negligence of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, if they deny us the same aid they gladly offered New York a few short years ago, if they won't pay the cost of the denuding our coast for a navigable river and our oil-and-gas, then the soul of America will be lost.

I can't blame you if you have disaster fatigue. Every day the newspaper brings another tail of woe. Thousands die when an earthquake collapses their ancient brick homes, a creaking wooden ferry overturns somewhere at sea and everyone drowns. It's almost too much to contemplate. Perhaps the cult of LaHaye is right, and the end is nigh.

Before your turn the page, think about this: New Orleans is not OK. We are not OK. And we are not discussing some distant, benighted village in the hills of Afghanistan or on the coast of Africa or Asia. We are talking about your neighbors--not just that your fellow Americans, but right in your own town. There is not a significant city or town in America that isn't hosting some cohort of the displaced. You pass us every day on the street, but perhaps you don't recognize the despair or the anger that squeezes at our hearts like an angry fist.

Know this: we are not OK. We will rebuild, with or without your help. We will, if we must, save ourselves. Whether your come to our aid as all honor and justice and charity demands will determine if you can save yourselves.

Katrina NOLA New Orleans Hurricane Katrina Think New Orleans Louisiana FEMA levee flooding Corps of Engineers We Are Not OK