Subject: I... don't know.
Author:
Posted on: 2015-04-29 15:44:00 UTC

I mean, I want to, don't get me wrong, but...

I have no idea where to start. I mean, I could start with Shaniqua watching the man who wouldn't drown... not drowning, probably during Hurricane Katrina, but here's the thing: I went into this without knowing one single Goddamn thing about New Orleans, and the more I learn, the sadder I get. I want to show her walking through a landscape that's almost post-apocalyptic in tone, because that's how New Orleans felt to me during what little research I've done so far on it - that after Katrina, Rome fell, and only now is it starting to bounce back, solely to the benefit of the rich white folks who lived there. The poor people? Sucks to be you guys, y'all get underfunded, overcrowded public schools an inch from privatization to be run by whichever collection of delusional twerps is willing to stump up the cash, regardless of what they actually intend to teach.

The relief efforts focused on getting the rich districts back to normal first. It was a travesty, and a tragedy, and New Orleans isn't being cleaned up - it's being sanitised. The poor people are just another problem for whom the solution is being forced elsewhere, because, as Bill Bryson once put it, "Americans don't know they want something until it's gone forever". That's how Mardi Gras feels in this Nawlins; an imitation of its former self, every edge filed off, krewes sponsored by McDonalds and American Apparel, with the thrown doubloons redeemable in branches of Starbucks for a gasometer of coffee that tastes like the literal personification of the Photoshop airbrush tool.

It used to be a party. Now it's a parade.

No, that ain't quite right. Now it's some ethnic festivities for rich white spring-breakers to gawp at brainlessly before going back to college on Daddy's money and write breathlessly inane blogs about what an experience it all was. You want a real Nawlins experience, blondie? You can't get it. 'Cause it means being poor and being black and being hopeless. It means being woke up every day at Too Damn Early o'clock by the smell of wet rot, goin' to a school where the kids have more knives than the cafeteria, watchin' your friends disappear into drugs and gangs and the pages of the paper when their luck runs out. You had a party. We are the people who gotta clean it up for the next damn white people on the next damn bus-

...

Wow, um, Shaniqua? I'm not sure who you are yet, and I'm not sure you are either, but you are angry and you are afraid of getting lost in a country that doesn't care about you one bit, and I am sort of very slightly in love.

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