What It's Like Here, Part 2

There's 2 sides to everything, I guess, and there's certainly 2 sides to New Orleanians feeling like this beloved old city, battered as she is, is the "center of the universe" as Chris Rose writes. The other side is that post-Katrina New Orleanians, across almost all the categories of race and class and gender, are hurting.

A friend of mine who used to live here (and who moved away before Katrina) alerted me that her former landlady was deeply depressed and agoraphobic, and on top of her own worries had an adult son who was apparently "drinking himself to death." Agoraphobia is rampant in the city right now, and some folks do indeed have the full-fledged deal, stuck in their house or trailer, unable to go outside. But a lot of people in New Orleans seem to have a milder form, kind of partial agoraphobia, meaning they can go to work, to the job they need to live on, but then they go back in their shell, and stay holed up and away from other people til the weekend's over.

A great deal of my ministry right now is just pastoral care, finding resources for people, referring them to what few counseling/social work/psychiatric/psychological services we actually have right now. Resources are scarce, plus there's that inertia and agoraphobia, so people are self-medicating big time with alcohol and other substances, legal and illegal. Big Man, who is in AA (sober since 1990, yay!), has been out on a number of AA-related intervention calls in the 6 months since we've been here, more than the 4 years we lived together in the Philadelphia area.

We don't like to talk about it, especially not in the media, since it just leads to copy-catting, but suicide is endemic here. Almost every person in the city is connected, either directly or indirectly, to someone who has committed suicide. The jail is our biggest mental-health facility these days. In addition to agoraphobia and suicide, there's also recurrent nightmares, chronic, clinical and subclinical depression, anger issues galore, and weird traffic accidents. You wouldn't believe the number of light poles and traffic lights lying on the ground as a result of being hit by cars -- every day there's more. It's strains credulity to believe all these hits are random, folks have to be *aiming* at the poles, perhaps self-destructively, perhaps without realizing that the poles are designed to break off and away from the vehicle striking them. (It would be VERY difficult to kill yourself hitting a light pole or traffic light pole, but maybe folks don't know that.)

Plus there's the general paranoia, which, after all, is based on having people *really* out to get you and do you harm. The Army Corps of Engineers, the Levee Boards, FEMA, your homeowner's or renter's insurance company, your car insurance company, the SBA, the Road Home, the ITC, the New Orleans Recovery Association, HUD -- who's to say they're NOT trying to hurt us? Isn't it at least a little bit sensible to walk around suspicious?

Then, there's the relationships crashing. In a congregation officially less than 90 adults, I know of 3 divorces/split ups; there may even be more than I'm not yet aware of. One couple in my church, long-time members, are planning to live at least 6 months away from the city, having purchased a house out of state. The wife is traumatized and can't take it here any more; she doesn't feel safe. A New Orleans attorney, friend of mine for close to 30 years, says that right after Katrina it was the men who went crazy while the women held things together; 2 years later, the men are doing OK and the women are dropping like flies. My friend says that periodically his wife brings up leaving the city -- and they go round and round for a while, talking about where they might live, and in the end, they come to the conclusion, Where would we go? How could we live anywhere else?

How could we? How could we live anywhere else? Living someplace else would mean having to explain yourself all the time, why you are the way you are, translating the weird things you say into English, trying to fit in a world less wonderful than the one you left. I happen to know all this is true, having lived away from the city for close to 15 years, I can testify that New Orleanians do NOT easily fit in elsewhere. We have likes and dislikes and preferences and expectations that do not fit in a "normal" place.

My attorney friend and I agreed tearfully that living with everything we have to deal with in a broken and wounded New Orleans was better than living somewhere else clean and efficient and safe, where we could not be ourselves.

There is some help out there, but you have to be able to reach for it. As I constantly stress to my poor hard-working, dedicated parishioners, I have access to some therapists and counselors, and I can help fill out the Red Cross forms for anyone affected by Katrina to get money for counseling. My church has started an every Monday Buddhist meditation group, free and open to anyone. A neighborhood group approached me today about starting something in the church for people who just want to talk about how the Storm and the aftermath are affecting them; kind of a self-run help group, like Katrina-Anonymous.

So this too, is what it's like here. We're all a little crazy, including me. We WANT to live here, and we love this place, but we must deal, somehow, with all that is going wrong, all that hasn't been fixed, all the crazy plans the Powers That Be have to make us into something we're not, all the fears, anxieties, and nightmares that we're not safe, that IT could happen again. But, over and over, we come to the conclusion that the craziness here is better than sanity elsewhere.