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Do The Right Thing

Open your hearts and your neighborhoods to those in need
Friday, December 30, 2005
By Chris Rose

I don't mean to pick on old Cyril Neville in every column, but it's just so darn easy.

Lately, the Bitter Neville Brother From Austin Who Besmirches Our Name has taken to wearing a T-shirt when he performs that says "Ethnic Cleansing in New Orleans."

And that's the truth. I, for one, am glad that we finally got rid of all those pesky white people in Old Metairie, Lakeview, Gentilly, Chalmette, Arabi and Plaquemines Parish.

They were beginning to bug me, what with their strange diets and music and taste in automobiles. Ugh! What's with this Prius thing, anyway? You call that a car?

Cyril has turned into one of those lamentable figures, the demagogues and rabble-rousers and so-called Christian Soldiers who use a disaster such as this to further their own bizarre and deconstructive personal causes and agendas, whether they be racial discord, homophobia or just the embarrassing need for attention. (See: Jackson, Jesse.)

Like Spike Lee, the acclaimed director who seems determined to displace Oliver Stone as America's chief conspiracy-minded filmmaker, who paraded around New Orleans a few weeks ago proclaiming that it was highly plausible that the levees were bombed to run all the black people out of town.

Well, I guess no one checked in with Houston and Baton Rouge when this plan was hatched.

The only real evidence to support this theory is that, if there was such a plan, it was mangled so badly that it wouldn't be hard to believe that the government was, indeed, involved.

If the plan was to run all the black folks out of town but all the stockbrokers in Lakeview got taken out in the deal, then it's not a stretch to think that FEMA's fingerprints are all over the thing.

The race issue is going to haunt our rebuilding process for years; that is a lamentable given.

And it begins with trying to fathom how 49 states just opened their doors, their communities and their hearts to our evacuees but now that we are trying to piece things back together here, AT HOME, we do not offer the same hospitality to our own.

The shame of this is unspeakable, the FEMA trailer thing and its concomitant cry of Not In My Neighborhood.

There is good reason to dread the great inconvenience that trailer parks bring, but here's the Big Picture on that: Inconvenience is going to be our way of life around here for an appreciable period of time.

We can bear it together or apart. We can open our neighborhoods to those who have suffered more than us, or we can wait for the whole damn thing to explode in our faces.

Here's a novel idea: You could introduce yourself to the trailer people. Wouldn't it be strange to discover you have the same interests in gardening or sports or music?

There is this daunting notion sweeping our community that some of these trailer parks will harbor -- horrors! -- POOR PEOPLE!

Well, yes -- and many of them were poor before Katrina and now they have nothing at all except a gleaming white trailer crammed up against a bunch of other gleaming white trailers and as experiments in social interaction go, we're up against tough odds and praying for a miracle of harmony.

Here's the thing about poor people: Most of them are honest. Many of them will become writers and artists and musicians and teachers and cops. Many will serve in the National Guard units that saved our wet and desperate behinds this fall when the bottom fell out.

And some poor people will even become rich. It's weird how that works.

And, truth is, they're less likely than Entergy or your insurance company to try and rip you off.

It is incumbent upon those of us who "have" to help those who "had"; help them (us) rebuild their (our) lives here in their (our) home. That the regular citizenry would block this is unwise, uncharitable and, more than anything else -- it is not the Louisiana way.

Let's go with the words of Spike Lee -- the title of a great movie he made a long time ago -- before he became a whack job and started claiming the Oscars were fixed because he didn't have one.

It was called "Do The Right Thing."

Simple advice. Somebody. Please.

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Columnist Chris Rose can be reached at chris.rose@timespicayune.com, (504) 352-2535 or (504) 826-3309.