When I left my home in New Orleans for a two week business trip in the middle of August, 2005, I could hardly have imagined that it would be almost full two months before I would see my house again. What's more, I couldn't have imagined, at all, the incredible level of devastation and the sheer state of chaos that I found when I returned on October 12th.
Get a cup of coffee and relax for a minute, and I'll tell you the story . . .
Our house was in a lovely older neighborhood optimistically named Gentilly Terrace that I later learned was built on reclaimed swampland, and ironically, one of the selling points when the neighborhood was originally developed was that the houses were built high enough to be safe from flooding. Our house was built in 1940--when I pulled up the kitchen floor after the storm I found an intact copy of the Times Picayune dated August 25th of that year between the floorboards and the sub floor - and many an older neighbor told me that my property had never flooded, even during the prior benchmark, Hurricane Betsy in 1965.
We were lucky in that our house was built on the slope of the Gentilly Ridge, and while houses two blocks toward the lake got 10 feet of flood water we only got 5 feet. Two of the three levels of our house got wet, and while we lost a great many sentimental and irreplaceable items and suffered significant flood damage we saved as much as we lost and that made us winners, at least, that's the way I saw it at the time.
The sad part, though, wasn't our individual loss, it was that our entire neighborhood was either destroyed or badly damaged; our favorite restaurants were gone, closed forever, local grocery stores that had been in business for almost 100 years were damaged beyond repair and the owners and employees missing, displaced or passed on, and, in our neighborhood at least, hundreds of elderly citizens who knew from years of experience that Gentilly simply didn't flood were trapped in their attics when the London Avenue outgoing drainage canal broke in two different places at almost the same time -- the Army Corps of Engineers, the constructor of the flood walls, later blamed the failure on "weak soil", btw. That's like blaming the Hindenburg disaster on the explosion rather than the engineering decision to use flamable gas as a lift agent, but when has this administration ever taken responsibility for anything?
But I digress . . .
The lake came into our neighborhood, and between the high water, the sweltering heat and the absence of any kind of coordinated rescue operation the old and the weak and the infirm perished in the most unimaginably undignified and cruel way. It was hearbreaking to see so many houses with holes in the roofs where the lucky ones made it out, and even more heartbreaking to see the houses with body count numbers painted on 'em by the rescue crews -- those were grandparents and parents and brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles, and every one of 'em had a story to tell.
My roots go back to Irish potato farmers and I like to think we come from hardy stock, so as soon as the water went down I came back and decided that our house could be rebuilt. More important, our house was close to the edge of a large un-flooded area and enough of the neighborhood infrastructure was relatively undamaged so I made a decision to rebuild ASAP. New Orleans had survived 300 years of storms and pestilence and ignorance and every other damn thing, and Gentilly as a subdivision had been around for almost 100 of those years, and I reckoned that it would take more than a hurricane to kill our neighborhood so the only thing to do was to get on with it. Over the next four months I fought to get power and gas restored, fought to get our streets cleared of debris, and I worked every trade needed to repair our house except for roofing - the gypsy crew I hired for that task were from Nebraska by way of Juarez and they slapped a new roof on my place in less time than it took for any other company to even give me an estimate.
It was a pretty intense time, and no matter how old I get I'll bore my kids and their kids and their kid's kids with my stories of living without electricity or hot water for a couple of months while I worked to get our place back in shape so my wife and son could return home from their temporary exile in her home country, South Africa. And I'll tell `em about the incredible sense of community that the few neighbors who were early returnees like me built amongst the rubble; we threw our first neighborhood party in my backyard on Sunday, November 13, and even though the destruction around us was unimaginable to most we grilled burgers and smoked sausages, drank cold Abita and Barq's from the bottle and listened to WWOZ in Exile on my battery powered FM radio . . . it was a bittersweet day to be sure, but man, for a moment it was almost possible to forget what had happened and we felt almost normal.
Back in November I felt pretty good about my city - New Orleans was my adopted home, but it was my home, even if my mama didn't go to high school within a thousand miles of the place. I was sure that George Bush would be so shamed by what had happened in those first ugly days after the storm that he'd kick the bureaucracy in the ass to get things handled, but it became apparent soon enough that his "whatever it takes" speech at Jackson Square was just more of the same kind of lie that lead us to war in Iraq but I still wasn't daunted. I got a little more disheartened when Donald Powell, the "Katrina Czar" appointed to relieve Karl Rove wrote a contemptible editorial in the Washington Post claiming that the sure hand of the free market should not be impeded by the corrupting influence of government as he declined to take any action relative to the crippling bankruptcy that Entergy of New Orleans declared in the aftermath of the storm. We were abandoned, the way my neighbors and I saw it, and we knew that if we were gonna make it we'd have to do it ourselves.
I took a few weeks off from rebuilding around Christmas to meet my wife and baby son in South Africa - I was exhausted and disgusted, and I needed a change of scenery. We spent time in the Durban area, the place of her birth, and like the president recently and Samuel L. Jackson before him, I enjoyed a moment of great clarity. I decided that we'd go back to NOLA, finish the job on our house, and sell it to someone who had stronger roots in the area than we did. Like I said, I came back early and lived in the house for a couple of months without power or hot water, so we were well ahead of the rebuilding curve. It also helped that I was able to pay for the job out of my pocket - our first insurance check didn't arrive until mid January, almost 5 months after the storm, and by that time I'd invested almost $30,000 in cash into the property.
We put the house on the market on April Fools Day 2006, and within three weeks we found exactly the buyer we imagined. A UNO professor and his wife purchased the place from us, and as far as I can tell they appreciated the quality work and good materials we used throughout the rebuilding process. They saw their future in New Orleans, but for a variety of reasons, I saw ours elsewhere . . .
While I was in South Africa I realized that Katrina was a perfect failure; it was a brutal and very visible failure of the local, state and federal governments, and more importantly, it taught me something about some of my fellow Louisianans that I couldn't ignore. You see, there are a very few ways in and out of New Orleans, and when things got bad in the city the local authorities in the surrounding parishes blocked the roads out to keep the "bad" people of New Orleans in. That's right, the Gretna, LA police department decided that they didn't have enough food and water to share with the folks in New Orleans, so they turned back anyone trying to leave the city. They turned back tourists, both from the US and abroad, and they even turned back a station wagon full of nuns. It was an ugly moment in the history of the great state of Louisiana, and as much as I love the joyous spirit and anything goes love of life that seems to be in greater abundance in La Louisiane than anywhere else, well, I just knew it was time for me to go.
I decided that the basic thing I learned is that folks in Louisiana expect less than folks in other places, and they get it, in abundance. For example, I asked my friends around town how they felt about what happened on that bridge, and most of `em were able to rationalize the behavior of those cops, one way or another. To me, that was the greatest outrage - I can see how some rogue policemen would behave badly in a difficult situation, but too many were too quick to make apologies for what I saw as totally unacceptable behavior. The Gretna police chief and the Jefferson Parrish Sheriff both maintain to this day that what they did was right, and last time I checked they were still in office living off taxpayer money.
As one friend chided me, it's always been that way in Louisiana, and he wanted to know why I thought that things would be any different during the storm. I asked him why he expected so little, and to this day we don't much talk about anything other than the weather, and even that conversation is pretty forced. You see, I'm white but my wife is Zulu, and our son's birth certificate lists his race as "black". That's what I call "skin in the game", and I decided that I owed more to my son than a life in a place where the color of his skin will matter more than the content of his character, where folks can turn their eyes from injustice, just like they have for hundreds of years.
As I type this I'm in Durban again; after selling our house we loaded our few possessions that survived the flood into a small container and shipped them to Africa where we now live. Between the folks in Gretna who refused shelter or a drink of water to others in need and the folks in New Orleans who don't get why that was wrong to the 37% of the American public who still don't get that GWB and his evil henchmen are living out some sort of neo fascist dream to remake the world in their warped and twisted image on our nickel and on the backs of our personal freedoms, well, I decided that I've had enough. I was born in America and I'll always be an American, but I have to confess that I'm not proud of who we've become and I voted with my feet. I'm sure my country won't miss me, and while I'm not sure I'll be able to say the same I sure as hell know that I couldn't sit by and watch the country I love turn into a backwards, dark and cruel place more reminiscent of America in 1890 than 2006. I've seen enough, thanks very much, and it's time for us to do something else for a while.
So here we sit in the land of Nelson Mandela; a country that's far from perfect but one that aspires to a non-racial, non-sexist future where the opportunity to excel is available to anyone who cares to work hard to get it. I'm living in a country that remembers the dark days of it's past yet knows that her best days are still ahead, and I'm excited to contribute my skills to a land where the government understands it's role is to create a level playing field where those who work hard and play by the rules are rewarded. I'm a strong believer in the notion of the New South Africa, and I want to do my part to help my family realize the future that Mandela dreamed about all those years when he was and so many others were incarcerated on Robben Island. Nelson entitled his autobiography "Long Walk to Freedom", and that's the way I feel, too . . . it's been a long walk indeed, but for the first time since 9/11 and it's terrible aftermath imposed on us by the Bush administration I feel like I'm living in a free country again.
But what's this got to do with Kos, you might ask? Good question, and I'll do my best to answer. Like what I saw in New Orleans, like what has been going on with the Bush Administration in general, good folks in South Africa turned their eyes to the truth of what their government was doing in their names during times of Apartheid. The Patriot Act is more repressive than the laws the National government used to disenfranchise the ANC and IFP, and Apartheid was only overturned, at best, when the white citizens of South Africa realized that the policies of their government were amoral and wrong, or, at the least, when the privileged whites realize that a future based on repression and fear of the majority was just not going to work - in short, apartheid wasn't in their best interest, and change became inevitable.
And that's what I hope will happen in the United States in the 2006 and 2008 elections - first, votes of conscience like we're expecting to see in Connecticut senate race, and even better yet, votes for change from former Bush supporters in 2008 who realize that they've been had by the Republican party and it's destructive political agenda of hate, ignorance and enrichment to the privileged few. I feel the winds of change blowing strong, and I sincerely hope that the Democratic party will nominate a strong, thoughtful and decisive candidate like Al Gore or Wes Clark so that I can cast my vote from abroad with pride.
But this is a Katrina diary, and as the the first anniversary of that evil bitch comes and goes I'm sure I'll be saddened by the memories of loss, both of friends who didn't make it and for a way of life that, for me, is gone forever. And I'll surely remember the joy I felt as my neighbors and I worked to rebuild our homes and our lives - adversity can create strong bonds, and I won't soon forget how excited we all were when natural gas service was restored and we could all take hot showers in our homes for the first time in months, or the way we danced in the street in delirious joy when the streetlight on the pole that fed our houses lit up for the first time. But most of all, I think I'll be thinking of my friends who stayed behind after the storm and are rebuilding their lives in Louisiana; folks who love New Orleans beyond reason, folks with family roots so deep and strong that living anywhere else would be unimaginable. It's a beautiful city full of kind, caring and wonderful people who expect little but deserve more - much, much more.
Thanks for reading,
~jeff