Photo by Kristina Volgenau
A recent study recommended that the city of New Orleans begin a planned evacuation due to the inevitable rise of the seas and the loss of protective wetlands. The assumption being that the city will be inundated or at the least become an island within decades. One of the recommendations includes possible movement to the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, a place many have already taken to in an attempt to get away from what they perceive as a dangerous city. Those who live in and love New Orleans proper see the north shore as something of a sad facsimile of the culture and vibrancy of the city proper. I’m sure it has its benefits and beauty, but it certainly is a completely different planet than New Orleans itself. The notion of living on the north shore is about as appealing as relocating to Akron, Ohio for many.
The city never made complete sense elevation-wise, and many suffered the fate of disease such as yellow fever, due to the swampy nature of the land. Even so, there really wasn’t a better option when the French wanted a thriving port on the lower Mississippi. The city has a horrible history as well as a sublime.
Something called the Code Noir required that the enslaved be given Sundays off, a minimal gesture to be sure, but one not even replicated in the colonial areas controlled by the English. This “day off” created a situation from which the enslaved could congregate, sell goods and maintain some vestige of the cultures they were torn from in regions of Africa. Congo Square was the site of such gatherings, and you can go there even now…… each Sunday, the drumbeat tradition is kept alive. Prior to the enslaved gathering there, native inhabitants met in the spot and traded goods as the spot was a natural gathering place throughout history. This small allowance of a free Sunday likely led to the music you know and love. The fusion of cultures and the reliance on something intangible to make life have even a small amount of joy in the most brutal of circumstances emerged from this history.
In the early days of the French Empire, freedom could be purchased by the enslaved in various ways, and many of these former slaves became connected businesspeople in their own right. Again, unbelievable evil in the form of “owning” other human beings, but oddly enough, even a sliver of difference in that Sunday off created an artistic and musical tradition so powerful that jazz, rock and roll—you name it, likely came forth from those traditions and the cultural mixing. This did not happen on the north shore of Pontchartrain or the other brutal slaver cities of the South. It happened in New Orleans, in the area off Rampart Street at Congo Square. You know, the place they say we should be fine with abandoning.
In the way of all things American, we want to cast away the things of beauty. To forget the roots that created the traditions we enjoy. Embrace suburbia until nobody has the extra funds to go to Home Depot to upgrade the countertops. Then let those areas die out and become empty and abandoned. It’s a symbolic loss to accept that we are helpless to stop climate change and must lose our places of beauty. Once that mentality seeps in, all things of beauty are considered expendable and that’s basically how we got here. The notion of a pursuit of happiness and things like building schools that are beautiful rather than using the same blueprints as the prisons (I’m sure there’s symbolism in that) becomes just a little too much for us. They tell us to be practical; they tell us not to dream.
They say that the funds just aren’t there to make lives………well, livable, beautiful and bountiful. What there are funds for is unending war and genocide, for the Met Gala, for a whole class of individuals who blend the stupidity of Idiocracy with the crass violent spectacle of The Hunger Games. We have unlimited resources for this sort of nonsense. Can you envision a species that allows certain members to hoard almost all resources while they fill their faces with plastic and plumage, sneering down at 99% of their fellow species? If we saw a subgroup of penguins behaving in such a manner, we’d say, “Wow, those are some fucked up penguins.”
They tell us we can’t have universal healthcare when “inferior” Mexico (Trump’s worldview, not mine, of course) is implementing just that in real-time.
They tell us we can’t have a livable wage. They tell us college students need to be smothering in debt and even then, they aren’t even remotely guaranteed a job that can afford them any type of safe life.
They say we all need to be prepared to have our jobs and lives upended by AI and we need to roll with it, all in the setting of no universal basic income. China recently passed a law that AI is not to be used to cost contain or limit human jobs. We have no such plans, and we see our Epstein class continue to build bunkers, including one Donald J Trump planning just such a bunker under his ballroom. Who is he worried about coming after him and why does it sound like he’s never going to ever leave? I guess they need to be underground to avoid the deafening roar of the data centers planned all over the nation as well.
What kind of world is this that they want for us? Well, I think it’s a stretch to even consider that they care if we live. The irony of it all, is that the consumer workforce is the only thing propping these ghouls up. The fact that they are too short-sighted to realize this goes miles in explaining their lack of planning and rationality.
A healthy human could not enjoy their life if they had billions of dollars in resources and knew their employees had to piss in jugs at their work farm. These aren’t healthy people that we’ve allowed to rule us.
It seems to be more a case of who can hoard the most, how few people they can keep alive as a worker class to ensure the very limited things they want to achieve.
I don’t have any overall answer for how to combat this, but I do realize that the manner in which Americans are being treated is not universal. Other nations do seem to care at least to some extent about their citizens, and the world will persist in some fashion after the American Empire.
Even if New Orleans and other beautiful places like it do become a myth in the future, a submerged Atlantis, if you will, the notion that the most brutalized are almost always the source of beauty and culture will not die.
They want to be rid of us or for us to become husks of humanity that will shoot each other for a bag of rice, because deep down, they know that is who they are. Our very humanity toward each other and a continued demand that we are beings of creative potential and have rights inherent in simply existing is the world we can never relinquish.
The post Long Live New Orleans and All of the Beauty Out There Like Her appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kathleen Wallace.