I graduated from Marlboro College in May of this year. At Marlboro, one completes a thesis project in order to fulfill graduation requirements, the thesis project is called "plan of concentration." Mine covered many topics, and was a labor of love. My feeling on it is that the whole undertaking would be rendered absolutely absurd (aside from the fact that I learned much through the process) if it isn't read. So here is the first component that I'll share for your consideration, dear (as of yet) non-existant reader.
The Big (not so) Easy:
A Personal Narrative
This is my cultural experience of New Orleans from the perspective of an outsider, a privileged white upper-middle class college attending New Englander, a relief worker, and a participant in the democratic experiment within the context of the Common Ground Relief Collective. Living in Ninth Ward New Orleans, one of the first freed-slave landowning communities in the Southern United States post-hurricane Katrina, had a very profound effect upon my worldview. It contributed to my nihilism by getting me acquainted with the ongoing reality of institutionalized racism in this country. It alternately contributed to my optimism to be surrounded by people who were taking an active role in combating that reality. I will try and articulate my experience of awakening through personal anecdotes and brief descriptions of a few characters that made an impression on me. I will begin at the beginning by sharing my feelings going into the experience, because it was an integral component of the experience, and gives insight into my expectations, fears, hopes, learning, and intention. The histories of Ninth Ward New Orleans and the Common Ground Relief Collective were almost inconceivable to me, I had no frame of reference with which to approach them, and these histories informed my overall perceptions distinctly, and are very important for me to share. To summarize what I learned in Louisiana I could say that nothing can really be taken at face value. Everything is infinitely more complex than I ever imagined, and everything is interconnected. Every problem has a root and compounding factors. And it’s not simple to try and piece together.
I left Vermont in May with a group of nine other Marlboro kids to drive to Mississippi directly from the funeral of one of my best friends at school who I had written out of my life three months before his death. I hadn’t been on speaking terms with this friend because it had been too painful for me to interact with someone who I cared for deeply, but didn’t feel could take any accountability for his actions. I was having a very difficult time reconciling with myself the premature end of our relationship months before, and my behavior towards him at that time of his death. But I wanted to try and take accountability for myself as just another distraught citizen who saw suffering and saw that the federal government wasn’t taking accountability for a tragic mess that they had contributed to generating. I did this with the mentality that by doing my small part I could be contributing to the greater good, and not focusing on my own innards. I didn’t know how difficult but also cathartic the work would be, and I carried my personal disappointment with myself along with me wherever I went, and it just kept on getting compounded and influenced by other varying shades of disillusionment.
When I arrived in the South it became apparent that it was not the place I was going to be able to process my emotions. Before arriving in New Orleans, I traveled to an Episcopalian based relief camp in Waveland, Mississippi called Camp Coast Care (CCC.) CCC was run autocratically by a Southern born homosexual painter named Van, who had formerly been quartered in Manhattan and had turned minister in the past five years. His organization catered primarily to the needs of a mostly white, religious working class demographic.
Mississippi residents who had been affected by Katrina, it seemed, were all furnished with trailers by FEMA , and all of the work I was doing there was reconstruction oriented. I learned valuable carpentry skills there, how to mud, sand and drywall, as well as how to house paint and to hate installing insulation. I crawled across the fragmented Biloxi Bridge as best as I could, and marveled at the destructive power of nature, and remembered how important it was to respect, admire and fear her. I held hands with and talked to elderly people who had been hoodwinked out of their retirement savings by cunning neo-carpetbaggers who served up empty promises of building contracts and garbage disposal under illegally acquired identities and who now couldn’t be tracked. There was a ten o’clock curfew at CCC, and our group’s behavior clashed with all of Van’s ideas of how relief workers should act and look. It seemed like all sorts of entities were coming to the aid of the people in Mississippi: corporate, governmental, religious and other, and I was enamored of what I knew of New Orleans culture and character, and eager to get to Louisiana to see if the stories of a new active and forward thinking Mecca amidst the wreckage were true.
I transitioned from CCC to an autonomously run organization called the Common Ground Relief Collective that had been born in an extremely large wake on the eve of Katrina. The reality of racism in New Orleans became apparent to me when I saw the distribution of hurricane relief. I noted upon my arrival in New Orleans that there were only a handful of FEMA trailers in contrast to what I saw in Mississippi. While in New Orleans these few trailers were scattered amongst tens of thousands of condemned houses that were still sitting in the middle of the street, in the middle of a city in which the street signs were hand painted by the organization I was working with. This is to illustrate the extent of neglect by and the uselessness of every natural disaster designated governmental organization that had been in the city over the nine months prior. The natural devastation was similar to that of Mississippi, it was just intensified in a contained, urban environment with a higher population density. In Mississippi I had been involved with reconstruction, and that project was an impossibility in New Orleans because it was still bogged down in debris. I was very well occupied reflecting on my part in the complicated story of New Orleans, and the history of corrupt police, corrupt legal system, institutionalized racism, socio-economic stratification, extreme commercialization and gentrification for tourism purposes and a certain reputation, and trying to attain an understanding of the factors that caused the catastrophe of the aftermath of Katrina.
Day to day life as a relief worker in New Orleans in the summer—nine months after Hurricane Katrina hit—was surreal. The heat, the nature of the work that I was initially engaged in, and how little the local government had achieved on behalf of the residents there so far were overwhelming. I was most distracted from my personal grief and my work by the immediate reality of wounded people walking around with post-traumatic stress, serious medical complaints that weren’t being treated, and crumbled lives.
One way I could keep track of myself was by writing notes to in a journal I had brought along to remind me of the reality of the world around me, and the reality of the experiences I was having. Another way was by taking notes in the back of my little back-pocket planner whenever I attended workshops or intensive trainings. Correspondence with the outside world by e-mail was also extremely useful, because I was so incensed by the situation there all the time that I couldn’t keep from talking about it. Opening dialogues with those around me and faraway helped me to ground myself, manage all of the information coming at me, learn how to place it into context and not find myself in a cloud of despair.
For a month-and-a-half I was part of an overwhelmingly entitled and privileged predominantly white upper-middle class presence in the middle of the now destitute, first free slave community in the South. The community was built on top of the unappealing bayou (for how low it is below sea-level, and the impossibility of fruitful agrarian pursuits.) I was working in the Ninth Ward with a bunch of anarchist crust and traveling punks, seasoned activists for various causes, and college student volunteers and feeling pretty alone, a corporeal participant in a democratic experiment. I was an idealist, and hopeful of learning a little bit more about communal life outside of the college context, and I lived for a month and a half at St. Mary’s of The Angels, the Catholic School that was gutted by the Common Ground with the agreement that volunteers could occupy it and run their operations out of it. At Common Ground, long-term volunteers (mostly 16-30 years olds) were the folks running the show because they had the most experience in New Orleans. That doesn’t mean that they had the most common sense or life experience though; there were no formal screening process in this most needy and desperate neighborhood in New Orleans with a history of neglect by outside and inside governmental forces pre-Katrina.
In New Orleans, it was commonplace to find displaced persons squatting in their own desecrated houses, infested by black mold, filled with toxic flood water-permeated objects that had once helped shape their identities. We were reminded repeatedly by the few remaining residents of the Ninth Ward when I arrived, that the Ninth Ward was engaged in a turf war with a town located right across the Mississippi River, Algiers. Algiers was trying to gain control of the drug trade in New Orleans, and was trying to make its presence known. The day I arrived in New Orleans, almost nine months to the day since Hurricane Katrina, trash removal by way of private contractors mostly from Texas had only just begun. Electricity was being restored in standing buildings in the Upper and Lower Ninth, but water was still a shaky business, and horribly contaminated. When I got to St. Mary’s all of the newly arrived volunteers were briskly informed by a long-termer of the situation they had entered into by being there and of the need for self-awareness. He told us of the inception of the Common Ground, and its motto, “Solidarity not Charity.”
One of the four founders of the Common Ground Collective was Brendan Darby, and I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to hear him speak at one of the all-volunteer meetings on the steps outside of Saint Mary’s in the first week of my stay there. He’s a young activist, hailing from Austin, who was politicized through watching a close family member struggle for relief from a degenerative illness, a result of corporate disregard for following toxic waste disposal guidelines, and government secrecy. Brendan emerged as a medical marijuana advocate, because that was the only drug that provided his relative with relief from the symptoms of his illness. Since then (pre-Katrina), Brendan had lived in New Orleans briefly and had difficulty finding an activist niché that would accept a white Texan. While in New Orleans, Brendan had begun corresponding with a political prisoner who was associated with the New Orleans Chapter of the Black Panthers when he was a teenager in the 1970’s, Robert King Wilkerson of the Angola Three. When Katrina hit, Darby tried to mobilize a group of activists to sail with him to New Orleans and evacuate his friend King, who had been pardoned and released from solitary confinement at the Angola State Penitentiary after 29 years only 4 years before the hurricane. But Brendan couldn’t gather a crew; so on the third day of flooding, he took a raft into New Orleans himself.
The Coast Guard and the Air Force and the Marine Corps and the National Guard and the State and Federal Police and Special Forces were in New Orleans by that time as well, and they instructed him to turn around, thus the journey was protracted. He went home to Austin and found Scott Crow, who agreed to go with him to find a more easterly spot from which to launch their small vessel into the water. A member of the Coast Guard held Brendan at gunpoint but he jumped out of his little raft and swam around for a while until FEMA came by on a rescue craft and saw him clinging to a submerged car and beseeched him to get out of the toxic floodwater. He demanded that King be picked up, and until then he remained in the water, Scott safely aboard. When Scott, Brendan and King met together for the first time, it was at the house of Malik Rahim, also a former Panther, a very active organizer in New Orleans, and for the cause of the Angola Three.
Between the four of them, they had a goal, $50, a stockpile of firearms that Scott and Brendan had brought along in case they had to defend Malik, because in Algiers there were Self-deputized White Supremacists patrolling in pick-up trucks as vigilante’s and shooting black people on sight and calling them looters. King looked at the other three and threw out “Common Ground,” and Malik said he was a firm believer in collective spirit. The goal was to create a community-based aid collective, and they opened up the first free medical clinic in Algiers within eight days of Katrina that was administering hepatitis vaccinations to poorly prepared FEMA workers and providing aid & filling medical prescriptions to the mostly poor and elderly trapped residents. They were able to do this with the help of street-medics from all over the country that Brendan, Scott and Malik had gathered together by promulgating the message that help was needed through their respective activist networks.
Hearing all this was a slap in the face from reality, and then I looked around. Most of the identifiable long-term Common Ground volunteers who were working as site coordinators for labor and planning intensive projects were an average age of twenty-one, with some older more New-Orleans looking types swooping in occasionally to make sure things were running smoothly. Of course, things weren’t running smoothly. The whole operation was badly mismanaged throughout the duration of my stay. The building was over-capacity. There were only three toilets consistently available (sometimes fewer) for over 300 people to use at any given time. Most volunteers weren’t committing more than two weeks to a project before going back to their lives, and the people who stayed longer immediately began training as site coordinators because veteran coordinators didn’t want to be responsible for things going wrong. Many long-termers who had been around since September-December, who were working from a model which supported a much smaller group, and had already witnessed the atrocities of the Spring Break influx that no one had been prepared for, finally broke around June, and went back to their lives scarred and torn. Things going wrong included but were not limited to: the unexpected thousands of volunteers at Common Ground during Spring Break which had resulted in the decision to open St. Mary’s (lots of cot space) for volunteers to live out of, and had additionally resulted in wide-spread cases of sexual assault, unrecorded quantities of thefts , arrests of several volunteers, and bad press.
The events of Spring Break and the summertime didn’t further the cause of Common Ground, they made it impossible for it to function as an autonomous collective, dividing and alienating valuable volunteers, and distracting volunteers from the advantageous activities they had been engaging in together previously for the greater good. With chaos reigning supreme in a dangerous neighborhood at a critical time, people were forced to assume responsibility for the less desirable realities of life at the Common Ground, and thus a certain hierarchy was formed. This hierarchy was based purely upon who could be relied upon to take responsibility for the actions of others, who was good with crisis management, who had been through the most and slept the least, and who could be relied upon to stay the longest. Thus, the people who had been around and continued to stay were absolutely the most inspiring people I have ever met, and probably will ever meet, and were profoundly dedicated to the democratic experiment.
I started out doing gutting work, wielding a crowbar and feeling righteous, and while this seemed to be the most immediate and direct way to have an impact, I found it too tangible; it was too emotionally draining to do for more than a few days at a time. I don’t know if you’ve ever had to throw away countless generations worth of collections of family keepsakes before, but I was so disturbed by it that I couldn’t be useful or rise with the four o’clock wake-up call while I was doing it. My friend Lauren and I, on one occasion had to discard a lifetimes worth of “Happy Mother’s Day!” cards off the wall of a Grandmother’s room. Upon further examination of my motives at that time, I can only conclude that gutting houses brought the carnage too close to home.
Instead of being useless, I sampled all of the avenues of vocation that Common Ground had to offer. The first few days not gutting houses, I laid low and cleaned showers and swept floors at Saint Mary’s, which was one of the most undesirable jobs amongst volunteers as there was a serial shower defecator; which was most likely perpetrated by a local resident who was disgusted with our presence and felt the need to make racial tensions even more apparent. Next, I got trained in legal observing, and attended several demonstrations in which residents tried to gut and re-enter their public and low-income housing, while I monitored police activity carefully. I worked in the Womyn’s Center for an afternoon and organized women’s sanitary products in a moldy shed, then dumpstered broken down boxes from behind a Family Dollar to sort them in, and then attempted to clean and organize a room while a young mother lounged on the couch, tiny children scrambling about her. I received a radical history lesson on the New Orleans legal system, and the evils of the prison industrial complex (the entire first floor of prisoners at the Orleans Parish Prison may not have been evacuated in the initial flood, and the sheriff isn’t releasing the records to families), the notoriously corrupt police (shoot black people on sight prior to and after arrest), and worked security at night. On one memorable security shift, an entire 90 lb. cell phone box containing 50 volunteers cell phones and over 20 different types of chargers was stolen during a Wednesday evening all volunteer meeting regarding crime and not flaunting privilege. We were told of a recent incident in which a volunteer was mugged two blocks away from St. Mary’s late at night. I worked at the Distribution Center in the heartbreaking Lower 9th Ward, which was run out of the very first gutted house in that area. The devastation of New Orleans and the uselessness of governmental infrastructures (or lack thereof) was most apparent there. In the Lower 9th, houses still stood in the middle of the streets nine months after the hurricane, and residents had to take daily trips to the Distribution Center to obtain donated bottled water, canned goods, hot meals, emotional support, shoes, and access to a telephone and internet resources.
After experimenting in a number of fields of labor, all of which were awakenings unto themselves, I finally committed myself to bioremediation work. The bioremediation team, I feel, was one of the most exciting things to be a part of in reconstructing New Orleans, because the mission was to heal. For me as a volunteer, it was cathartic; all other aspects of labor in New Orleans involved the unquestionably vital tearing down of old structures, theoretical and physical, but bioremediation work alone allowed one to participate in the reciprocal process of learning and teaching new ways of thinking, and putting them into practice in order to create a healthier and more harmonious environment within a community for people to live in once they could come back home. The team did black mold remediation with efficient microorganisms, or EM, a slightly suspect cocktail of bacteria that supposedly have the ability to out-compete the mold for a food source. I attended a workshop hosted by an environmental advocate at her office in Baton Rouge on EM with several other curious skeptics on the team. There, we were met by a group of zealous Scientologists who promoted EM as a solution to the world’s problems for an hour or two and then presented their “expert”, who was a company representative that spoke to its applications and contents. Almost all questions were answered to my satisfaction, except for the few that I asked: What is the effect of EM on an ecosystem over time? And, specifically what bacteria is EM composed of? No long-term studies had been done at that time by any scientific entity outside of the manufacturer to find out the answer to the first question, and the bacterial formula was pending patent and therefore could not be released for another few months. A demonstration as to how to mix and dilute the mother culture ensued. I left feeling flustered by the bizarre ambiance, frustrated with the info-session and outraged that it was being so widely applied with no complimentary research to back it, which seemed like it compromised the whole scientific ethic. But it worked better than bleach, and was certainly less toxic.
Simultaneously the bioremediation team was engaged in ongoing practical and productive perma-culture projects, which were mostly lead by long-term kids, while learning the theory behind it. For three hours two evenings a week we learned about soil biology 101, and the trillions of toxins and dangerous bacteria from sewage that the soil in New Orleans was host to. A problem before Katrina, but since Katrina the very soil wasn’t healthy to even tread on; depleted and broken and vile, and if inhaled, had the potential to cause cancer and long-term neurological damage. Only the strongest little weeds made their way to the surface in the poor parts of the Big Easy, and those little weeds vivified our team. Even if the land wasn’t really fit for people yet, we could try and restore or at least salvage a little bit of the biodiversity of the ecosystem . And we would only be providing a little bit of education if it was requested, and a jumping off point for the (traditionally) extremely involved community organizers who were trying to pick up the pieces of their lives and repair their neighborhoods. The composition of the soil was appalling, as the adult organizers Environmental Engineer Lauren Ross (Prominent Austin-ite and witch known to us as Juniper), Starhawk (yes, the Starhawk), and renowned direct action organizer Lisa Fithan (of the Yippies!, RNC, and WTO demo’s in Seattle) sadly informed us.
There were 1,000 parts per million of lead occurrence in the soil (the EPA deems 200 parts the legal danger threshold nationally), as well as petrochemicals, arsenic, mercury, pesticides, herbicides and insecticides left over from the flood. We tackled these ghastly statistics with organic solutions. Turns out the City had decided to coat the railroad tracks with arsenic to prevent animals from nearing the tracks. It was determined that the off-the-chart mercury and lead contents in the soil came from archaic housing structures that have never been up to code, and also could have their origins traced to the spill-over from flooded chemical processing plants and flooded dumps. Lead, arsenic, and mercury are all naturally occurring elements in soil in smaller quantities, so as a team we tapped into our collective knowledge for plants that naturally absorb them. We planted sunflowers in every yard on Desire Street, and in the yards of people in communities targeted because of chiefly abysmal levels of pollutants, to absorb the lead. The issue of safely disposing of the sunflowers became apparent, so we brainstormed solutions for dealing with disposal. We spawned oyster mushrooms from spores in a controlled environment to be introduced to select areas where there were high levels of petrochemical contamination that could be broken down in the decomposition process and be safely reintroduced into the soil in their elemental forms. We brewed compost tea to begin the soil healing process. We tended a community garden that its propagators could safely return too, resplendent with a healthy, well aerated, and heaping compost pile, full of red worm castings and nitrogen.
I kept staying longer and longer than I initially intended because my neural connectors kept on replenishing themselves with fresh myelin coatings, and my heart kept on pumping, and I wanted to stay and contribute to something fresh until my body processes stopped. During my second-to-last week in New Orleans, we hosted a community barbeque out of one of the gardens we had been working in with all fresh vegetables we had grown. When the workday ended, sometime in the afternoon, we would shoot the shit and smoke cigarettes with the other kids on the stairs who were involved in other projects and came from all over the country. Or we would talk with residents, or explore the neighborhood during the day on bikes, while we could in relative safely. Or we would make stencils that exclaimed “Meg Perry Healthy Soil Project!” in the shape of a sunflower, or that had anti-bulldozer graphics. There were so many opportunities for self-expansion and self-exploration, and we were all simultaneously humming with the pain of the world, for the most part with reluctant acceptance, and also excited to be existing in the aftermath of a disaster that uncovered a legacy of so much hurt and could be a vehicle for so much goodness.
For anyone whose interest was held long enough to get here, this might be interesting too:
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/1/6/prominent_austin_activist_admits_he_infiltrated
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