Being Poor Like the Nolas By Boyd Blundell
http://www.tpmcafe.com/node/28359
When I’m talking about poverty in my ethics classes, I’ve always felt like I’m missing something. I cannot successfully communicate the sense of helplessness that goes along with it, the sense of being the victim of forces to large to understand. But above all, I cannot communicate the sense of humiliation that comes with accessing an impersonal system, or in receiving charitable support for one’s family in order to survive. I myself have never been in that position.
No longer. To be part of post-Katrina New Orleans is to understand something of the helplessness and humiliation of poverty, regardless of your personal income. Let me tell you about the Nolas.
New Orleans is the equivalent of a family (let’s call them the Nolas) that lives in a very affluent neighborhood (let’s call it Bush Gardens). The Nolas have always been a bit of an oddity among the other families in Bush Gardens. They’re not all that well off, but that’s not it. Their closest neighbors on the southern edge of the neighborhood are no better off, but they never seem as unkempt, never quite as scruffy as the Nolas. The Nolas are justweird, but in the eyes of the neighborhood, it has always been a good weird. They are a hospitable family that throws great parties with the best food and spectacular music, and pretty much the whole neighborhood has fond memories of the Nolas and all their weirdness.
It’s been a very bad year for the Nolas; as disastrous a year as anyone can remember. Their house burned to the ground, the entire property is destroyed, and they can’t even think about the expense rebuilding the family house until all sorts of even more expensive repairs are done to the property. Much of the family is bunking with neighbors. Some died in the fire, and a few are unaccounted for. And while the fire department and other emergency services haven’t done such a great job, most of the people in Bush Gardens are great. They seem to feel really good about helping the Nolas. But when it becomes clear that the help needs to be ongoing, the enthusiasm of many starts to wane. Because the causes of the Nola’s sudden “poverty” are very complicated and not easily fixable, many quickly become distracted by other things. Some are actually quite hostile, as though the Nola’s flagrant suffering is an insult to their sense of propriety.
This last group can be awfully brazen, and turn out to be very influential. This poor family, asking for help in its tragic circumstances from a neighborhood it helped build, suddenly finds itself being lectured on all its faults. The Nola’s begin to hear mutterings that they’re asking for handouts. The well-to-do Cato family offers a hectoring lecture on the Nola’s lack of sensible financial preparation. (Of course, they were wrong. But then, the Catos think that the failures of the fire department only goes to show that there should be no fire department. The Nolas think the Catos need to get out of the house more.) Other families launch aggressive attacks on the Nolas’ character, and some on the neighborhood council oppose any financial aid to a family so dysfunctional. (The Nolas think the council is pretty dysfunctional itself). The Nolas are asked, with no irony whatsoever, why the neighborhood should chip in to help them.
The Nolas, when they have time to think about it at all, are mystified by all this. “When did we become a them?” they wonder. Less than a year ago, the Nolas were part of the “we”. The Nolas were so cool that they made the whole neighborhood look cooler. Despite the neighborhood’s impressive wealth, travelers would often choose to come to hang out at the Nola’s messy and slightly dilapidated house. When the neighbors traveled, they were proud to claim the Nolas as their own, and were pleased to accept that the coolness of the Nolas were part of what made the neighborhood so great. Those crazy Nolas were firmly in the “we” column.
But now the Nolas are finding out what it’s like to be a “they,” to be “those people.” It’s not a whole lot of fun. The Nolas never had the most polished social skills, and have a difficult time in the other neighbors’ houses. Nor are they the most articulate people, so they have trouble explaining why they think they should be still part of the “we,” or how hurt they are that they’re not. They know that historically they were the gateway to the neighborhood’s wealth, and that the process of getting energy to the neighborhood houses had destabilized their property and made their plight that much worse. They had contributed. The Nolas find it a cruel irony that they became a “those people” at the precise moment that they most needed to be a “we”. And they find that their less savory relatives want to cooperate with the neighborhood and let most of the family property rot. On the nicest corner of the property, they want to build a banquet hall that will be a brighter, shinier version of the Nola’s old, rambling house – and people will come to the banquets and pretend that they’re at one of the Nola family’s amazing parties. But the Nolas won’t live there anymore.
The Nolas are a complex family. The younger and more idealistic Nolas are just waiting for things to go back to something like the way they were. Older and more experienced family members understand that things will never be the same, that their family will never fully recover from this. They hope that if they work hard and learn to make do, they’ll salvage the most important parts.
But the wisest members of the Nola family are the ones most worth watching. They’re heartbroken, and you can see the impending sense of doom on their faces. Every day, they become more and more convinced the neighborhood will abandon them, that they are the poor that the neighborhood wants out of sight. They work on the property alongside their family, but they are humiliated, and they work without hope. In their darkest moments, they have come to suspect something awful: There is no neighborhood. They realize that the if Bush Gardens could do this to the Nolas, who had been such a celebrated part of the neighborhood, then it could do it to any other family in a similar plight. It is dawning on these wise Nolas that not only will they be abandoned by Bush Gardens, but that the neighborhood they were always so proud of is nothing like they thought it was. And that hurts even more.
I fear for the Nolas.
I fear for the neighborhood.
