The New Jersey
town where I live is beautiful in winter, a season that, because I grew up in
New Orleans, still surprises me.
This week, the streets are scattered with glittering snow and
neighborhoods look serene under the bright blue sky. I imagine all the families
warm and safe inside.
Underneath this
surface, the financial crisis looms—so many lost jobs and foreclosures. The signs of this are not visible if
you scan the neighborhood quickly, but those losses are very real and they are
there.
And yet when my
husband and I take my daughters out to play on our street, I still imagine our
suburban street disappearing. What
would happen I think, as I watch my girls, if the houses on my street were swallowed
by water, wrenched off their foundations, nothing left but the front steps? If
in front of every missing home stood piles of trash, furniture, duct-taped
refrigerators? I would suggest
that everyone spend time imagining their home, their household, their church,
their school eradicated. Everyone should ride down Highway 90 – “Hurricane
Alley” — through Alabama and Mississippi to New Orleans to witness the
devastation: the tangles of dead
trees, the leveled buildings, whole neighborhoods erased.
Everyone
should spend time in New Orleans—where before the storm the poverty level was
23%, nearly double that of the nation. Where, three and a half years after the
hurricane, houses are gutted, molded, gone and neighborhoods have disappeared.
I don’t say all
this to be callous or mean spirited, but I worry that we feel more comfortable
believing in the easy narratives of rebuilding, recovery and that all-American
favorite, closure.
And so instead I
turn to poetry because what it offers is the opposite of an easy
narrative. As poet Jane
Kenyon writes in her poem “Otherwise”: “[I] planned another day / just like
this day. / But one day, I know / it will be otherwise.”
And why
shouldn’t it be?
I
think of Kenyon’s words, as she reminds us of the alternatives to the lives we
lead. And so even in the midst of
the terrible financial crisis, we must not forget the people of the Gulf Coast
who have suffered and continue to suffer so much – who could be us, who are us.