The Big Easy Ain't So to Explain

I'm blogging from New Orleans, where about 20 of us are staying and volunteering this week. We arrived Saturday before around 10:30 a.m. (CST). Following the 18-hour or so van ride, a few of us were more than ready to go for a run, down Prytania and Magazine Streets. In the evening we found our way to Bourbon Street, which is impossible to compare to anything I've ever seen. At least on Saturday night, it is a party that stretches for more than a mile, with a constant flow of pedestrian traffic and, even though Mardi Gras was a few weeks ago, people throwing beads from balconies.

Several times in the last couple of days, I've heard that New Orleans is the most European city in the United States. I hadn't heard that before I came, but I believe it, given the diversity, the food, the music and the laissez-faire attitude about alcohol. (Open container laws? We don't need open container laws in N.O.) In some ways, one could also say it's the most American city. After all, this is where jazz was born, where Jefferson snookered Napoleon en route to manifest destiny, and it's the third-largest port in the country, where the Mighty Mississip' meets the rest of the world.

Of course, we're all here because of Katrina. Today a few of us visited the Ninth Ward, and walked across the foundations where there once stood houses that were swept away by flood waters. We looked at the new levees, which hardly seem built to withstand another Katrina. One could write several books about how complicated New Orleans' problems are; they simply cannot be distilled. Anyone who tries to do so — to dismiss the problems in a sentence or two — is not telling the whole truth. Pre-Katrina poverty, post-Katrina incompetence, mismanagement, geography, limited resources, poor planning, dysfunctional schools — all of these and more have contributed to the scarring of this great American city, but none of them alone explains what has happened here. Driving by the tent village under the bridge at Claiborne Ave., where many of New Orleans' 12,000 homeless people sleep at night, one can't help but be disgusted, repulsed, ashamed that this could happen in the United States of America. I know I was. But then I learned that there were 6,000 homeless people here before Katrina. Suddenly I'm embarrassed that I didn't know that before I came.

In a few hours I will return to the Ninth Ward, to work for Desire Street Ministries. There is much to learn and do this week.