Wet Bank Guide

The emerging hierarchy and tension between those who came home early versus those who came later against those not yet returned, and possibly not returning, occasionally boils to the surface in blog posts and comments, in online forums and letters to the Picayune, with the early returnees claiming the first right to speak for the city, and chastising those who criticize who have not returned and often don't plan to.

I struggled with this new twist to our complex identity culture and class system myself all Fall.

When I started this blog, I called upon the training and practice of a decade of journalism and treated New Orleans and the Flood as distant events. I spoke of the city and the survivors (and the victims) in a third-person remove, even as I ranted and raved against the water and the storm, the government and god. This came easily, as I lived in Fargo, N.D. on 8-29, and have lived away from the city for almost two decades.

This detachment was a mask I had carefully crafted when I worked in newspapering, the one costume I cherished above all others, and wore 364 days of the year. It was a mask made by someone who cheerfully took a first job paying in the high four figures (pause for internal arithmetic), and faithfully discharged the vow of distance and objectivity that mask implied, an oath faithfully undertaken so long ago.

I took up that old familiar mask for the protection it afforded me. A grandchild of the Cote des Allemandes, German reserve kept me from weeping for my dead father for years. I first wept after Katrina on September 1, as I wrote the post The Tragedy of St. Bernard.

As as the year ground on and events developed and I wrote endlessly on them, I could never bring myself to use we or us, always speaking of the people of New Orleans as if they resided in a distant land. That enforced remoteness helped me to bottle up the genuine pain and anger, and channel it into this forum. It was also done out of respect.

I was not a survivor, not among those who remained or who snuck past the checkpoints to return home in September or November. Their place in these events is special, and they will be marked by it for life as much as the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were: traumatized by what they say, wracked by survivor guilt, suffering more than any others the stigma the rest of the nation stamped on NOLA.

As my wife and I considered a return to New Orleans, I maintained my journalistic distance, and even as I wrote about my own reaction to events, never dared to speak of we or us, to put myself in the same group as those who had lost all, who came home early to the devastation. Then, fully committed to move home, in this post I took the plunge

I still find myself hesitating as I write about the recent flood elevations. I didn't lose my house. I can't fairly say We in this space when it I'm not one of those who lost everything. Still, because I care deeply about the city I have to speak out on these issues.Certainly my condemnation of the preliminary flood maps goes contrary to the grain, and perhaps everyone who did lose there home is happy to know what to do next, even if they don't know how to go about doing it or how to pay for it. And some day, I'm sure, someone one or some group or survivors will tell me to shut up, that I don't have any right to speak for them, that I am not one of them.

It's their priviledge to tell me what is best for them, to tell me when I'm wrong, even to remind me that I'm not one of them. It's never a claim I've made. To correct me is a right they've earned, have paid for in pain.

However, I would hate to see us add another divide to our already convoluted caste system, another measure by which to judge our neighbors. As the storm vividly and violently exposed, and as event every since have amplified, that which makes New Orleans the city it is, the city we love, are the things that divide us: the haves of Carnival and Commanders, the have-nots at the Second Line or the corner po-boy place.

We don't need another divide. Everyone who loves New Orleans wants, at some level, the best for the city and its people. They want this whether they suffered at the Superdome, lost their lives savings in Lakeview, or even if they watched from afar as I did. I'm coming home, but several people who write about the city as I have are not. They left, as I did, for their own good reasons and with a partially broken heart, as if parting from a lover. They have gotten on with their lives elsewhere, and mean to live out those lives in that elsewhere. Most, with a few bitter (mostly partisan) taint, say otherwise. I don't care about them.

I care about the community of New Orleans, which is bigger than the geographical boundaries of Orleans Parish or the Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area. If the city is going to survive, we are going to have to figure out how to cooperate, how to work together--black and white, uptown or downtown, survivor and expat--to convince the nation to help us, or to figure out how to do it on our own.

We don't need another way to measure Us and Them. That's what's killing us, more than the storm or FEMA or the Corps of Engineers. Dividing ourselves into Us and Them.

(cue end of Us and Them blending into Great Gig in the Sky....

New Orleans Katrina Hurricane Katrina FEMA levee flood Louisiana Us and Them We Are Not OK

// posted by Mark Folse @ 5:01 PM