Thoughts on visiting New Orleans this week (Pt. I)

[zulchzulu]

It's been Obama's hope that the magical city of New Orleans comes back strong and perhaps sets an international example of how a region that was left for dead can come back by the sheer grit and determination of its proud and celebrative people.

You can look in the eyes of the children watching the pre-Saints NFL Parade who still have a variant of post-traumatic stress syndrome and see that they are adopting to the possible promise of the future while facing the adversity of government cutbacks and ingrained sense of hopelessness from their elders.

While watching a parade exercise before the big event on Thursday night, I watched a school band lined up at Jackson Square with horns, trumpets, tubas and drum corps looking straight ahead with some eyes of the young musicians scanning the admiring crowd. This was serious. This was determination. This was discipline. This was possibly the beginnings of young musicians learning the seriousness of art after they saw the absolute chaos of unplanned life events like Katrina.

They stared straight ahead and when they played, it was like a volley of machine gun accuracy; a crispness in perfection and a sense of marching to the best with playful precision.

I was blown away. I teared up. You could see the proud parents or loved ones nearby for this practice for the big event.

As I looked at the large posters for the upcoming photo exhibit on Katrina's fifth anniversary by the Cabildo, looking at how these young people (95% African-American or Creole) had a special confident stride in the step was indeed inspirational and yet questioning.

There is a Katrina anniversary event that the Vieux Carre Historical Society that just nails the abject disaster on so many human levels. One of the most haunting testimonies for some of the Katrina survivors taken involved "seeing the beast" come out in some people after days without food or water. It's that tragic point when the need to survive at all costs overtakes the need to be civil and compassionate. It is the human condition at its darkest core.

Those spirits, like many others who have danced in the fog here over the centuries, seem far away now. It is almost incomprehensible to think that such tragedy happened on these streets that one can walk calmly now.

When you also add the literal dark cloud of oil spillage lurking under the Gulf from the BP-Deepwater spill that is affecting this region of the World, you can see in the eyes of the children some kind of shielding courage. They get that from their elders who look at that ecocide disaster as yet another evil to battle.

I've eaten seafood almost exclusively while here just to send them a message that they will not be abandoned, not be tossed aside and not be turned away. We'll soon see just how bad the spill is.

The storm… the spill… hopefully, there will be some reprieve in this magical place.