opinion

by michael tisserand

Wave of anger

WHEN WE DROVE away from our home in New Orleans, we packed just enough for a weekend trip. We'd been down this road before. Mayor Ray Nagin urged evacuation, and my family followed orders, left town, planned to return sometime Monday.

A friend of mine, Keith Spera, decided to stay. A music writer for the Times-Picayune, he holed up with others in the newspaper's office during Hurricane Katrina. While my family set up a camp 200 miles away, in a friend's living room, he ventured into his ruined hometown to file reports about the dead bodies he saw.

Keith just sent me this e-mail: "It's the most horrific scene you can imagine. Where is the aid? Where is the military? Thousands of people at the convention center have received nothing – no food, no water, no instructions, no authority – for three days. Bodies lying in the street uncollected – it's inconceivable that this is happening in the United States. I interviewed so many poor, elderly, and frail people trying to make their way from Central City to the convention center. Many simply will not make it."

Those interviews should become required reading in our nation's history books.

New Orleans is gone. The exotic destination where tourists could carouse Bourbon Street and act the fool, gone. The troubled and cherished home where we worked and raised our children, gone. The birthplace of Louis Armstrong, the muse of Tennessee Williams, the wellspring of the rhythms of the Neville Brothers, gone.

In one long week, my city has become a national disgrace and a symbol of a shameful presidency.

I blame no one for the storm. We in New Orleans knew the stakes. Every time a hurricane veered toward us and then lurched away, we knew it wouldn't be the last time. There'd been hurricanes before, there'll be hurricanes again.

But like the dust bowl that Woody Guthrie once eulogized in song, what happened in New Orleans in the final days of August wasn't just a freak of nature. Thousands of my neighbors are now dying in the streets due to bad policy and official neglect. As I watch the dismemberment of my city, I now realize too late: We should have had the fight in us.

In the gracious state of Louisiana, confrontation is not our style. Witness last week's interview of Sen. Mary Landrieu by CNN's Anderson Cooper. Landrieu, a centrist Democrat, was thanking her fellow senators and thanking the Congress for passing a $10.5 billion aid package. She was still thanking people when Cooper cut her off to say he was in coastal Mississippi, he'd just seen a body being eaten by rats, and people down there didn't want to hear politicians thanking each other.

"Do you feel the anger that is out here?" he asked.

"Anderson, I have the anger inside of me," Landrieu replied flatly. Then she went on to thank the president.

Mary Landrieu – and all of us who are refugees – must now take a cue from the neighbors we see when TV cameras pan across those who are sick and dying on the streets. Every time I watch the scene, someone jumps in front of the camera, waving their arms. "Get a picture of this!" they're screaming. "Would you look at this shit?"

Forget "the Big Easy." Those screams are our new motto.

We New Orleanians – the luckiest of us, at least – are now scattered across the country in friends' homes, in motels, sleeping on rows of cots in sports arenas. We can reunite and rebuild. Even those of us who can't return to live in the city will have a role in reclaiming New Orleans.

But it's going to take something we've never managed to do before. We're going to have to fight for our poor city.

Please join us.

Michael Tisserand, the editor of the New Orleans alternative newspaper Gambit Weekly, is currently living in Carencro, La. He can be contacted at michaeltisserand@yahoo.com.