finalmente

A little late on the wrap-up, I realize. Something about the epic nature of the drive home (we lost the distributor on the Civic and spent 18 anxious hours at the Days Inn in Villa Rica, Georgia, waiting for the world's most kindly mechanic to put us back on the road) and the sudden jolt of snapping back into routine without the benefit of any real downtime drove the blog urge right out of me. Travel demands writing, record; home is habit - it records itself by virtue (vice?) of constant repetition.

But I digress. Remember the giant FEMA tent where we claimed to sleep in perfect brother(and sister - it was co-ed, after all . . .)hood with the full spectrum of our fellow man? Well, in case you were skeptical, here's the documentary evidence:

Courtesy of new friend and fellow Queens high school teacher Mike, who happened, serendipitously, to be staying at Camp Premier and working with the same volunteer organization we were.

Thank god Kantor had the foresight to bring earplugs enough for all . . .

Kept the rain off well enough, at least. Bearing in mind, though, that the place was FEMA administered, never topped 30% capacity (or so it seemed to my untrained eye - these aren't official statistics), and no one could give us a straight answer about who was staying there or who was supposed to be, here are a couple of images that require no further explanation:

No doubt I could spend a little time standing on a soapbox at this point, but I have neither the energy nor the inclination to reiterate what's already been said to better effect elsewhere. What I will say is this: I've never had a more palpable sense of being right out on the razor's edge of something (what? 'world events?' 'the American frontier?' civilization? the words escape me . . .) than I did during the week that I was in New Orleans. In New York, one has the sense of being a very small part of a very large machine - we all perform our appointed tasks at the appropriate hour, and we don't need to speak to anyone on the train or notice who we pass in the street because it can be assumed that we're all working towards the same goal: keeping this urban organism alive and ourselves alive with it. In post-Katrina New Orleans, every action has its own life, feels like it could be the start of something brand new - strikingly so, almost as if one could pursue one action, a singular focus, and watch reality take on a new shape with every step of the process. I've joked with colleagues about packing it in and heading down to start our own school, but the fact is, it's no joke. The distance separating decision from action is paper-thin down there . . .

So why not go? Fear, maybe. Laziness, more likely. But beyond those obvious culprits, there is a feeling that whatever tiny, imperceptible positive changes one can make in a system that, even if deeply flawed, is at least up and running, will in the end amount to more than a thousand independent islands of organizational perfection forged from total chaos ever could. I'm struggling to articulate this idea, and it keeps getting away from me. There is something deeply American - something that speaks deeply to a uniquely(?) American psychology - about being able to pioneer a reality organized according to one's ideals. One gets away from the momentum (or inertia) of the critical mass of humanity in order to shape a new world for others to share in. That's very possible in New Orleans right now - possible in a way that I've never experienced before. But humanity is a mass, and maybe it does need top-down organizing principles in order to succeed - in order to provide its constituent individuals with what they need to survive and thrive. Those principles - or the illusion of those principles, at the very least - are present in New York, as they are just about everywhere else I've ever lived or traveled. In New Orleans, they are conspicuously absent. That's the risk - and the opportunity (I can't count how many times I've heard, in recent Katrina coverage, the old adage about the Chinese character for 'danger' being the same as the one for 'opportunity' - a tired truism, but a hard one to argue with . . .). Anyone with radical notions about the nature of democracy should be there right now, testing their faith. Ramblings, for me, end here . . .