Katrina Redux: The Work's Not Over

(From the Janesville Messenger, 7-20-08)


In the spring of 2006, nine months after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, I went with a group of other volunteers from our church to do clean-up work in Chalmette, Louisiana.
Chalmette is in St. Bernard Parish, a county that was almost completely wiped out by Katrina.

Out of 27,000 homes located in the parish, all but two were declared uninhabitable after the hurricane and flood. Though New Orleans’ poor Lower Ninth Ward got most of the media attention, St. Bernard Parish was as annihilated as any place.

At the time I was in Chalmette, I was amazed that even though it was nine months after the storm, it looked like it might have happened the week before. Debris was everywhere. Abandoned houses sat open, their fronts spray-painted with red X’s that stood out like scarlet letters announcing the sins Mother Nature had committed. Lawns were dead. Entire neighborhoods were dead. The number of FEMA trailers were relatively few, as residents who had fled had not returned.

But we were there to do our part, and that we did. We worked hard all week, reducing several homes to empty shells, the first step in making the structures habitable again. We did our job, felt good about it, and returned to the safety and comfort of our homes in Wisconsin.

Although the experience had a profound effect on me, some of those thoughts and lessons inevitably start to fade with time. And so I had not given a lot of thought to Chalmette until a recent newspaper article found its way into my hands.

It is now almost three years after Katrina, yet some of the photos accompanying the article looked no different than what I had witnessed 26 months ago. My heart sank. Though there has been progress since I was there, Chalmette has not returned to any type of normalcy.

Some people have moved back, but the parish still has less than half of its pre-storm population. Many abandoned houses with red X’s still stand. Empty, boarded-up strip malls still dot the landscape. Broken streets remain. In some cases, concrete slabs where houses once stood are the nicest part of the landscape.

The residents are poorer, the parish government is cash-strapped, and crime has gotten worse. While there are pockets of relatively normal life in the parish, much of the area is far from healed.

In retrospect, I don’t know why I thought it should be any different. I saw with my own eyes how bad things were, how far they would have to rebound. What kind of Pollyanna would think that one week of volunteering would magically result in the dramatic rebirth of an entire county?
It speaks to the magnitude of the destruction that even after thousands and thousands of volunteers have poured into Chalmette to help, the area is still a mess. Frankly, it boggles the mind.

After digesting all of this, I began to think about the specific houses my group worked on. Are they finished? Are they now inhabited? Had 80-year-old Benny moved back in to his house, or had he followed his family out of town? Have Cody and his mom been able to leave their trailer? What happened to Tom, the 76-year-old bicyclist shopping for salvageable items in the debris?

It was suggested to me that Samaritan’s Purse, the organization through which we volunteered, could tell me the status of the homes that our group worked on. I nearly made that call to find out. But then I thought, no, that’s selfish. It’s not about me or my group or a self-serving detective mission to verify that what we did made a difference. It’s about the people in St. Bernard Parish, and their continuing struggle.

While I am glad that I made the trip to help, reading about the current state of the area makes me feel like I could have and should have done more. It’s like the difference between having eggs or sausage for breakfast: the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed.

In the case of Chalmette, I was the chicken. But one thing is certain. Whether it’s Chalmette or some other situation, it’s time for me – and maybe for all of us - to be the pig.

Bewatched

(From the Janesville Messenger, 7-6-08)

Does anybody really know what time it is?
Does anybody really care?
If so, I can’t imagine why....
- Jazz/rock group Chicago

Chicago’s sentiments from the idealistic 1960’s seem quaint now. We all care about the time, because time makes us care about it. After our alarm clock wakes us up, our kitchen calendar tells us where we have to be and when, our Microsoft Outlook pops up a window to remind us when it’s time to go, and our Blackberry buzzes or rings for the same reason.

Thanks to the schedule functions on cell phones, iPods and PDAs, more people are starting to view wristwatches as fashion accessories rather than timekeepers. But to those of us who still rely on our wristwatch, it is much more than both of those; it is an appendage.

For example, recently my beloved Mickey Mouse watch broke. When it comes to entertainment, I’ll take Bugs Bunny over Mickey any day, but where timepieces are concerned, the mouse wins, watch hands down. This was my second Mickey watch, a unique one that had Mickey looking left instead of right and wearing a look of either surprise or anger - I could never tell which. Since I primarily wore it at work, either could have been appropriate.

I went to my backup, an old CBS-TV Olympics watch I had won as part of a sales contest over a decade ago. I had no intention of making that watch my permanent appurtenance, but it would do for the time being. Within a few days, however, I remembered why I had stopped wearing it in the first place. It had a flaw, a sharp point where the watch connected to the band, and the result was a pair of snagged dress shirts. Trying to fix the watch just made it look bad, so like a Tibetan protester, I boycotted the Olympics.

My final emergency watch was a pocket watch I used to wear at a time when I wore suits every day to work. I’ve always liked pocket watches but without the additional pockets a suit jacket gives you to carry your stuff, it became impractical, losing the fight for pocket space to car keys, change and breath mints.

It never really got a chance for a rematch. As I was trying to put the watch back into service, I managed to break off the piece of metal that holds the watch battery in place. Three clock strikes and you’re out.

The result was that I spent a week without a watch. It was amazing how such a small change can throw you off. It felt strange. I felt naked.

I looked like an idiot when, out of habit, I would end up staring at my empty wrist three or four times a day. To try and shake the habit, I transferred my cancer bracelet from my right wrist to my left wrist. It didn’t help; I looked even weirder trying to tell the time by looking at a bracelet.
As bad as my watchlessness was for me, it would probably be worse for my wife. At least I take mine off. She wears hers to bed at night, because her uncorrected vision isn’t good enough to see the alarm clock on her nightstand.

Fianlly, I made what will most likely be my purchase highlight of 2008 - a new vintage-style Mickey Mouse watch. Bewatched again, I feel much better, like a caffeine addict who has gotten his 150 milligram fix in his morning latte.

As is my custom, I have set the new watch five minutes ahead, in a futile attempt to not be late for appointments. Though I think all that has done over the years is to condition me to the fact that my watch is fast.

Maybe if I set Mickey ahead ten minutes…

Too Young To Die

(From the Janesville Messenger, 6-29-08)

Twenty-four years old is too young to die.

You hear about the murders of young people, and you think that it could never happen within your family, not even within your extended family.

But that’s what happened. The son of my wife’s cousin – technically, her first cousin, once removed – was stabbed in the heart after a “verbal altercation” at a party in Chicago. A suspect has been arrested, a guy with an alleged reputation for cutting himself and others with knives, if the blog entries I read about the case are to be believed. Other hearsay suggests that the murder suspect held a grudge from an earlier incident where he crashed the cousin’s party and got so intoxicated that he went on a window-breaking spree that resulted in his arrest.

Regardless of the details, the only important fact is that a young man just starting to make his way in the world was brutally and senselessly robbed of his life.

Although we see his parents and grandmother occasionally at family events, I couldn’t tell you the last time we had seen him. I mainly remember him as a little tow-headed kid running around at family reunions. I recall at one such reunion, he and his sisters were a little bored and I entertained them by playing softball with them.

From what I gathered at the memorial service in his hometown of Madison, it sounded like he had gone through a bit of a “wild” period when he was younger but had found his niche and was a very happy young man.

He had graduated recently from the Illinois Institute of Art and was working as a graphic artist at a marketing firm. After his death, his family was surprised to learn that he was a celebrity in Chicago’s “street art” community, going by the moniker of “SOLVE.”

How is “street art” different than graffiti? Some people would say there is no difference. I would say that the main difference is that graffitists aim to deface public property, where street artists aim to beautify it or at the very least, make it more interesting. SOLVE would take an ugly rusty electric box and turn it into a green and pink polka-dotted wonder. Or, in one stunt that got plenty of attention, he adorned the seat of an el train with a real TV set that had “We are experiencing legal difficulties” on its screen. He employed stickers, stencils and a variety of other methods and materials. No matter what you thought of the concept, you had to admit the kid was both talented and clever. This was no gang-banger with spray paint. Although as one friend said at the funeral, “I would tell him, ‘It’s still illegal even if you don’t think it should be.’”

I had never been to the funeral of a murder victim before. The reverend who presided was a friend of the family, and his message was the right one – that anger toward SOLVE’s assailant would not bring him back.

He was eulogized by speakers representing the various parts of his life – his family, his Madison neighbors, his Chicago friends. The funeral home took down their art to allow his work to be displayed on their walls. A large number of his friends from Chicago made the trek to Madison, many of them wearing t-shirts or temporary tattoos displaying the SOLVE logo and some of his other oft-used icons. The leader of the band in which SOLVE played drums performed a couple of songs. The place was so packed that there wasn’t enough room for everyone.

His family made it clear that they intended the day to be a celebration of his life, not a mourning of his death. But the truth was still inescapable, and it was hard for me not to walk away thinking this was the saddest funeral I had ever attended.

There was a meal after the funeral, at a place called the Wil-Mar Neighborhood Center. It calls itself “A Place for all People” and hosts a variety of inclusive programs and events. As I approached the door of the center, I noticed that the outside of the building was covered with a huge, beautiful mural.

I couldn’t help thinking that SOLVE would have approved.