Hoodoo has taken on new and deeper meaning in New Orleans in these new century Post-Katrina days, once again, as the soulless moneymongers attempt to assert their version...........
This blog will document their attempts to dominate, to take over and remake New Orleans in their unholy (though they think of themselves as the only holy) $$$ image........This blog will also expose the suspects for Hoo they are....expose the truth and curse their underlying predatory motivations against the people - those few still here and those trying to return.....And....this blog will shine the light on the real people, whose efforts made New Orleans America's most unique, most interesting, and most creative city....those unsung heros whose spirit, creativity, knowledge, talents, and adaptability of the real and true New Orleans who possess what urban anthropologists have routinely come to refer to as our "improvisational impulse'.... imbued within our souls.......
Michael Depp, in his piece "The Time is Now: New Orleans and the Poor", on NPR's "All Things Considered" , put it to the nation the other day when he said, "....For now an economic wall has been built around the city's broken remnants.......Prior to Hurricane Katrina, poverty overwhelmed the city. Poverty starved the city's public education system. It spawned ever-escalating rates of murder and violent crime. It festered in public housing. Make no mistake though. New Orleans also needed its poor. The working poor that is.
We had to have poor people to clean hotel rooms, bus tables, wash dishes and fill the thousands of low paying jobs that supported our vital tourism industry. But we also needed poverty's culture. Mardi Gras Indians, second line parades, jazz funerals and jazz music for that matter. These were all poverty's beautiful children. New Orleans put them out front and center to be admired by the world. Poverty was not a monolith in pre-Katrina New Orleans. It contained different, complicated and sometimes contradictory faces. The drug dealing thug and the beautiful, grandiose Mardi Gras Indian.
So who do we let back in? The poor are multitudeness (sic) but so are the upper and middle classes now nervous at the prospect of their return. Some decry the poor out of simple bigotry. They envision a new, smaller city teaming with professionals and white picket fences where there is no room for poverty's dirty faces. Others have more measured concerns. New Orleans didn't have nearly the social services or infrastructure to effectively deal with poverty before Katrina. How can we welcome back the poor without letting their problems overwhelm the city again?
Of course what all of us here are going to learn soon enough is that you can't cheery pick among the poor. You can't bring back the hotel chambermaid and leave her troubled son behind in some other city as someone else's problem. The price of cheap labor is steep in social consequences. Before the storm we were unable to deal with the consequences. Can we, will we now?
We are in an odd moment in New Orleans today. Like the Pied Piper, Hurricane Katrina took away the scourge of our poverty in one grand and sweeping action. But now our streets are empty and it's dull in our town. Our poverty is gone but we are bereft of our poor."
And today, on the front page of the Washington Post - " A City Fears for Its Soul- New Orleans Worries That Its Unique Culture May Be Lost", by Manuel Roig-Franzia, a Washington Post Staff Writer who writes with understanding and love...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/02/AR2006020202746.html
New Orleans, the city and its tourism industry, has long traded on the creative work and efforts of its poor.........and the economic benefits were reaped by just a few.........ya can't have it both ways.....that kinda hoodoo ain't gonna fly no mo'...cuz we're back...everything has changed, and is gonna keep changing.........wrongs are gonna be made right and the skeletons gonna be dancin' in the streets!!
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment