Life Goes On

KATRINA T-SHIRTS ON BOURBON STREET
NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA
October 2005


Oh yeah, life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone…
From “Jack and Diane” by John Mellencamp

They are tossing Mardi Gras beads in New Orleans, and from miles away in New York City, I’m trying to understand what that means.

When the fog of shock begins to lift, the world suddenly looks brighter and stranger, painted in circus colors, all humming neon activity. And you drag yourself into it, still chilled with the cold sweat of nightmares, wanting to feel that radiant heat of people simply living. Because life, you are certain, still goes on, has been going on, while you have been going through the motions. But now you are stronger, ready to take it on again and so you wade out into the crowds, and you are hit with the queasiness of it all, like the greasy food smell of the midway at the county fair. And you find you don’t have the stomach for it anymore, the cheap thoughts, the shallow concerns, the arms reaching for the handfuls of glitter.

“We’ll be back, New Orleans will be back.” Yes, yes I know they say this, they have to have this, they mean every word, purely defiantly. I remember that same thing: we’ll build more towers, exactly like they were, no, even better than they were, better and taller and more beautiful, and we won’t forget, somehow we’ll combine never forgetting with making things even better. We had to, yes we did, had to believe that we could combine the future, the present and the past in a riot of meaningfulness more glorious than anything anyone has seen before.

But what we forget is that the excitement of life is the just barely knowing, the hints of a wonderful day that rises with the sun, the anticipation at the top of the first hill of the rollercoaster. And when the ride goes off the tracks, the carousel spins crazily, the Ferris wheel gets stuck half-way around, all the thrilling what-ifs in the back of your mind become real, and you know too much to go back easily to the adventure of now.

There is not a six-month anniversary date for Hurricane Katrina. That date would be February 29, a date that exists in limbo much like the people Katrina dispersed across the country. I hear that for Mardi Gras, people dressed in blue tarp like their roofs, crossed themselves with spray paint X’s, created clothes of MRE packages, made fun of FEMA, small thrills against the persistent devastation, small efforts at forcing life to go on. And today, Ash Wednesday, the party’s over and they return to their trailers if they are lucky, to their tents, their cars or moldy blown out waterlogged houses if they are not. They wait for mail, electricity, gas to be restored, for stores to be reopened. They pick their way around debris untouched for 6 months. They go back to looking for the dead and feeding the now-feral dogs. And the media packs up its cameras and goes on, on to the next dramatic crisis, because hey life itself goes on.

And go on it does, although it leaves in its path places where time has stopped. I first saw the cornerstone to the Freedom Tower a couple years ago, sitting forlornly in a muddy pool of water surrounded by a rickety wooden fence at the bottom of the pit where the World Trade Center once stood. It is still there while people squabble over every inch of ground around it and the unidentified dead rest uneasily in trailers awaiting their return to the place they died. And in New Orleans and across the Gulf Coast, the same thing: squabbles over the land, the levees, anything and everything that can be squabbled over, while the survivors exist in trailers awaiting their return to the place they once lived.

Yes life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone. But try to get the thrill back, any way you can. Enjoy the parades, drink the hurricanes, dance in the costumes, throw the beads to the outstretched hands all across the city. And try also, if you can, to forget the muddy beads from previous parties, still flood-tangled in fences, along the dead empty streets of splintered collapsed houses and useless overturned cars, in the places where life has stopped.