Thursday, January 12, 2006
 Ryan
C. Fleenor, College of Arts & Sciences
It has been very easy over the last few days to get caught
up in large details – the thousands of homes destroyed,
the jobs lost, or the amount of relief aid that has poured
into the Gulf Coast. While fundamentally critical to any meaningful
evaluation of the present situation in New Orleans, such information
is, I think, limited in its ability to convey the extent to
which, for many people, life has been rendered unintelligible
since August 2005. No piece of data could ever convey the
pain and frustration experienced by so many here; to even
try, it seems, serves only to compress the voices of this
great city’s residents into one more statistic to be
printed and forgotten in the annals of public policy and history.
These statistics, these hard facts, comfort us by empowering
us to see the situation here as an equation to be solved or
an engineering system to be tweaked to perfection. Such data
lull us into believing – falsely, I think – that
we can fix all of our problems through the simple application
of cold reason and thoughtful public policy.
Unfortunately, the real world is not so clear cut. We must
remember that the disaster in New Orleans is as much a human
catastrophe as it was a natural disaster, and the people of
this city were as wounded as its infrastructure. Entire neighborhoods
continue to fear that they may not be allowed to return home;
with the stroke of one urban planner’s pen, a neighborhood’s
civic identity and collective memory could potentially be
forever lost. Many people have lost all faith in a government
that seems at best incompetent and, at worst, malevolent toward
its citizens. This was made abundantly clear when the city
made public its audacious and contentious plan for reconstruction
during a press conference yesterday. The anger and sense of
abandonment welling up within the men and women who rose to
confront their government was like nothing I had ever seen
before.
The human scale of this catastrophe was made real for me today
as I undertook the task of recovering, cleaning and repairing
the statues, plaques and historic artifacts of St. Mary’s
School in New Orleans East. Founded in 1867, St. Mary’s
has a long and proud heritage of providing educational opportunity
for the African-American women of New Orleans. It was this
sense of memory and place that “Team Trophy” (as
we dubbed ourselves) set out to preserve, and I am very proud
of our work. As Sister Greta Jupiter, the school’s principle,
reminded us at lunch over Po-Boys, these artifacts may seem
small and insignificant, but they will be the small tokens
that help provide continuity and identity as the school tries
to secure its future in the face of damage estimates exceeding
$4 million.
In our own small way, I hope we are helping those we meet
return their lives to some semblance of normalcy and regularity.
Whether that be gutting a house to begin the process of reconstruction
or polishing an obscure trophy from the 1960s, I am glad we
are here to do whatever we can. I just hope and pray that
we don’t forget people like Sister Greta at St. Mary’s,
or Father Joe in the Lower 9th, or Sister Eileen here at Xavier
Prep. It will be people like them who reconstruct the spirit
of this city, and it will be up to them to preserve its connection
with its storied past. I have every bit of faith that they
are up to the task.
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