I had been sitting in the Magazine Street cafe for hours, straining to think of a topic for this Katrina anniversary column, when I decided to read more online news about New Orleans. I tried to wade through these differing takes on the city in order to get a clearer picture of its state.
On the one hand, as I read the city’s and Loyola’s websites, I saw a sunny view of New Orleans as a unique cultural center. The city’s tourism website lures in viewers with the slogan “Welcome Back to New Orleans” and touts Voodoo Fest, Saints football and famous trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. Loyola’s Admissions Office has a page about “Life in New Orleans” that serves to reassure parents about on-campus and off-campus safety, with links to restaurants and hotels, many on Magazine Street.
Tellingly, Loyola’s map leaves out the areas most devastated by the storm.
But as I read some of the national press about New Orleans from the past few weeks, I encountered a much bleaker picture. Former Tulane Professor Douglas Brinkley’s article in The Washington Post last Sunday, “Reckless Abandonment,” painted an apocalyptic picture of a country leaving behind a “moldering” city of ruins. A Time magazine cover story by Michael Grunwald from Aug. 16 featured a picture of a levee captioned, “Two years after Katrina, this floodwall is all that stands between New Orleans and the next hurricane. It’s pathetic.”
How can one write about the city after digesting all of this seemingly contradictory information? As best I can tell, none of the four pieces I cited featured any untruths. The official sites put a positive spin on the repopulated areas, while the two articles gave a mostly realistic view of the major challenges of flood protection, federal resources and blighted neighborhoods.
In fact, this struggle to juxtapose such divergent images echoes the mental gymnastics involved in trying to become a more socially responsible college student here. Sometimes, I feel as optimistic as the official websites do, like when I devour a shrimp po-boy at Johnny’s Po-Boy downtown or I volunteer for Habitat for Humanity with many new freshmen. But just as quickly, Brinkley and Grunwald’s doubt takes over again when I pass an abandoned house in crime-ridden Central City on the drive Uptown, or I catch a glimpse of the gates next to the Lower Ninth Ward on the ride back from Habitat. These mental tides ebb and flow in my mind every single day, and it takes a lot of reflection to make any sense of them.
The best that a college student can do is to try to transform those moments of optimism into helping the city get back on its feet, in whatever small way one can, even if that way means writing about the struggles to make sense of the city from an air-conditioned cafe on Magazine Street.
I think I found a pretty good topic, after all.
