This op-ed essay was written at the request of Open Source Radio host Christopher Lydon, and published on that site to coincide with the president’s State of the Union speech.
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The state of our union
By Jon Donley, January 2006
Perhaps no American city has faced such an uncertain future as metro New Orleans faces at the beginning of this year. So as the nation prepares to hear the president’s State of the Union address, it’s time for us to do likewise. Unfortunately it”s hard to focus on the state of anything outside our own ongoing tribulation . . .
This is the state of the union in greater New Orleans today, exactly five months after the levees broke and drowned us.
Embrace our pain.
Like all Americans, we are survivors. With or without help, we struggle through the day, enduring brutal living conditions and rebuilding what we can. We bury ourselves in our work to forget, and collapse in tears during the mind-numbing commute to our makeshift homes. Some of us live in tiny temporary apartments, some live in the second stories of gutted homes, some live in the rare trailers, and some sleep in tents in the rubble of their homes. From above, we are a checkerboard of blue roofs, even in the areas least damaged.
We curse the bureaucracy that has squandered aid on multiple layers of outside contractors, when our own people are begging for a job – any job. We are grateful that the first reaction of our countrymen is to shelter us and send aid. But we are stunned by the second, and more permanent, reaction . . . to tell us that we deserve our fate, and that we must put our city behind us and move on to a new life in which New Orleans does not exist. We weep at the evil of those who preach racial hate – both those who accuse us of literal genocide against our black brothers . . . and also those who find a silver lining in the exile of tens of thousands of our black brothers.
Those fortunate enough to find housing in the city of New Orleans live on an island we call the “Sliver by the River” . . . the high ground nearest the Mississippi that did not flood. We rarely venture away from the island, because the emotional pain of driving through miles of wasteland is too much to bear. We are like the survivors of a shipwreck, packed into a lifeboat and living on rationed food and water . . . looking back across miles of wreckage drifting on the ocean. We are grateful for life and safety, but we relive the horror of the shipwreck every day . . . the chaos, the frantic dash for the boats, the screams of those left behind.
Do we deserve our fate? Did we choose to live in danger? These charges and accusations reflect a smug, mobile-class world view, from a society that is essentially rootless. And one whose primary interest is self-interest. This is not a good thing. Most people do not choose their roots. Those who use this argument as justification for avoiding the communal expense of aiding New Orleans are robbing themselves and the country of part of its soul. Those who gloat are just not quite human.
New Orleans is not a place that can be abandoned . . . not by its people. Its a culture, treasured around the world. It is our history, our tradition, our roots. We can no more imagine abandoning New Orleans than you can imagine abandoning New York, or Boston, or San Antonio.
So here we live, surrounded by the brokenness and desolation of a people scattered and shattered. We have no assurance of rescue, aid, or even a future. The state of our union is grim. Tribulation indeed.
But enough of us have hope, to ensure that we will not yet die.
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