“If y’all keep paying your money to see it,
should we rebuild it?”
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Please take a moment to view this public service announcement that was produced by a local New Orleans production company, 2-Cent Entertainment. It really gave me pause.
Shortly after Hurricane Katrina in the fall of 2005, you could ride through the Lower 9th Ward in New Orleans on virtually any street and see cars moving slowly throughout the flooded and ravaged neighborhood. If you looked closely at the cars, you would see camera lenses protruding from passenger and backseat windows. Everyone living in the city before the hurricanes knew that New Orleans was a virtual “fishbowl” before the storm. Only now, the residents and their suffering, were now encased in that thick glass bowl, filled with water. The world moved slowly around them, watching and capturing footage of their misery. Many of the visitors were from out of town. Most had never heard of the Lower 9th prior to the storm.
When I returned to the city to retrieve my belongings in October 2005, the Lower 9th seemed frozen in time. The combination of the wind and the flood had shoved houses off of their foundation, slamming them into one another like an action movie set. Cars were flipped over in the most unusual positions; holes were busted in roofs from attics where people fled to escape the rising waters. Boats were overturned on the sides of streets and awkwardly settled on front lawns.
I know this because I, too, visited these neighborhoods and captured it all with my video camera. When friends and family came to visit, I drove them through the streets to see the damage for themselves. And, I have to admit, I started to feel ashamed. I’m no longer offering my own Katrina “tour” and the PSA video does a good job of explaining why.
Today, nearly 4 years after Katrina, many of the homes in the Lower 9th have either been demolished by the city or have remained vacant and empty. All that’s left are newly constructed homes, raised several feet off the ground; an unusual sight to see on stretches of lonely streets with just 3 or 4 occupied homes. There are empty lots and stairs that lead to nowhere. The sturdiest structure on many of these streets are the oak trees. Some of the empty yards have flower memorials that represent the families that once lived there. A graffiti tag on the side of 4-plex apartment reads, “This was Home.”
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Posted by Claudia on June 18, 2009 at 12:25 PM
That PSA certainly does make you think twice. What’s the line between “raising awareness” and “exploitation”?
I’m sure some of the tour operators will argue that they are exposing and/or bringing attention to an important issue and that the tourists will argue that they are sympathetic to the cause by giving their attention (or donating $$ to habit to humanity, etc). But the idea of people and their suffering being on display for money, made a spectacle of from an air conditioned tour bus – something about the folks with their cameras seems deeply offensive and wrong.
What’s the better way? Is it different when the cameras are CNN or the NYT? We want those folks to keep paying attention, right?
Sorry for the rambling…good questions, good questions.
Posted by gorjus on June 18, 2009 at 2:55 PM
Oh, holy hell. I have no idea what to say about this. Those signs are eerie as anything I’ve ever seen–”we’re still here.” This is what you paid to see, isn’t it . . .
For a while I got really angry at folks I knew who took photographs of Katrina devastation (in my part of the world, more on the Gulf Coast), to the point where even when I took some myself–(they’re art, I told myself, it’s a Polaroid and it’s art, this isn’t some digital journo crap)–I could barely look at them. They became less documentation or lament and more commerce.
I’m just flat-out floored by that video.
Posted by Prof Fury on June 18, 2009 at 3:10 PM
Oh man, this is a gut-punch. In a perverse way, this makes me curious to take one of those tours — I’d really like to know what the tour guide’s spiel is like. Do they try to justify what they’re doing along the lines Claudia mentioned? Do they just ignore the moral and ethical problems posed by their enterprise? Man.
Posted by jp! on June 18, 2009 at 4:21 PM
These tourist trips are like paying a tour bus to drive you to a shelter so you can gawk at abused people with shattered lives (all in person).
NPR did some stories concerning the “tourism” http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10292676
Posted by Rich on June 20, 2009 at 12:56 AM
I felt the same way about ground zero of the former WTC when I lived in NYC. And there hasn’t exactly been a big rush to rebuild there either…
Posted by carleen on June 20, 2009 at 11:37 AM
It seems to me that we should all see what happened and burn it into our memories. But there is something sickening about doing so from an air-conditioned bus and taking pictures as souvenirs. I also get creeped out by tours like the gospel Sunday morning tours viewing folks in their “natural habitats.” And avoided going on a tour of an Indian reservation for the same reasons. Remember in Slumdog when the tourists (American or European) paid the guide to show them the slums of Mumbai? I heard a friend of a friend tell about her guide in India taking her to his home, which he shared with something like 6 people and was no bigger than my friend’s living room. I was ashamed for that woman telling the story, and am still not sure that Slumdog’s popularity wasn’t related to 1st world guilt. But how do we address these issues if we don’t see them? Do you stop each tourist and weigh their intentions before you let them see? I’m with Claudia…raises many questions.
Posted by Doret on June 20, 2009 at 11:15 PM
To ride through peoples living pain on vacation while taking pictures is just so OMG are you kidding me. It looks they were on some kind of safari outing. So how much of that bus tour money is making it back to the Lower 9? Look I made a funny. I do think its different when News crews go, b/c they’re not so some bus tour. Some of what they film may end up on the news. Even if it doesn’t the good reporters (with hearts) will still get the word out. I can’t remember the last time any news station have talked about the Lower 9. Some of the people taking this tour may justify it by saying they gave to such and such charity to help rebuild New Orleans. To them I say, your contributions have not to made it to the Lower 9. You have no right and even if it did you still have no right. I hope a few of the Lower 9 ghosts follow the picture takin, chillin on an AC van folk, to their hotels and give them a good scare.
Posted by Thinking Aloud on June 22, 2009 at 6:16 PM
From the bus they can say that they were there, but does that matter? They can take photos and videos to show to their friends at cocktail parties as they discuss the ills of the nation. But did the bus ticket help anyone. Did a portion of the proceeds go to help the tenants of the 9th ward?
Any profit from devastation and lives lost is horrible. Especially when no one is doing anything really real to change the lives of the people who were displaced, devastated, denied what the government really could have done to help.
Posted by Cassandra on June 24, 2009 at 5:35 PM
EXCELLENT short film!
I was in the Lower 9th Ward two years ago, worked with the only charity in the lower 9th ward at the time to clean up a yard or two very close to the area in this short. While another part of my group built a playground for a charity in Algiers. After clean up we visited the only open science and math school open in the 9th ward at that time.
Not nearly enough done on our trip, so I’m not bragging but I said that to say that the devastation was so staggering and so embarrassing to still be there that it caused me to do more and to give more and to try harder to be better and do better by NOLA, so I am on the fence about this. Because if just one of these tours becomes the catalyst to changing everything for the lower 9th, ultimately I can’t be mad and have to just deal with the disgusting tours that don’t affect change.
In my far removed but deeply concerned opinion, if you put yourself in the position to have to judge the motives of the GAWKERS you take the focus off of the ISSUE which is to FIX the Lower 9th WARD.
See the problem is that we should ONLY have pictures left to remind us of Katrina, THERE SHOULDN’T BE ANY PHYSICAL EVIDENCE LEFT of this terrible tragedy and TRAVESTY.
And that is the REAL crime here, the fact that there is still TIME in 2009 to go run and gawk at in the lower 9th…
It’s 2009 y’all, I don’t know about you, but I need to do better and I shall.
Posted by Frieda on June 27, 2009 at 10:22 PM
Thank you for your responses to this piece! So many great questions have been raised here. Some of you responded with the question of “what’s the better way?” How do we keep people paying attention to New Orleans? I would argue that the $35 bus tour certainly isn’t helping. That money isn’t going towards anyone’s hurricane recovery. I can promise you that.
The problem in New Orleans is that so many people continue to profit off of this disaster. I like to call it “Disaster Pimping.” The tours, the contractors, the never-ending grant money (all in the name of “recovery”)…. It’s a well which doesn’t seem to be running dry anytime soon. But sadly, this is not new to the people of New Orleans. The residents of this city have always been dumped on. When Mardi Gras time comes, what happens? People travel to the Big Easy far and wide to let their “hair down.” And what do they leave behind? Their trash in the streets for the working poor to pick up. Even the Mississippi River has cashed in on the deal. The waste from all of its bordering states flows from north to south and right into the Gulf.
What can never be captured in a tour or on anybody’s disaster footage is the way in which the trauma of Katrina still lingers in the soul of every child and every adult that experienced this tragedy. People still remember sitting on that interstate, waiting for help. People still remember how quickly that water rushed in. How do we repair the psychological damage that Katrina left behind?
I bet no one would pay to see that.
Posted by Amanda on July 6, 2009 at 11:16 PM
I spent last summer working in New Orleans, and I didn’t go to the 9th ward once– I never had a true reason to go there, and the idea of going there just to see the devastation struck me as exploitive. Most people I know don’t understand why I didn’t make the trip there– but work never took me there, and I never met up with friends there, so if I had gone, if would have been with no more purpose than gawking at the sorrow of others. And that, I feel, would have been disrespectful.
Posted by Claudia on July 7, 2009 at 8:09 AM
Hi Amanda, thanks for stopping by. I have really enjoyed reading the range of perspectives and approaches to this continued travesty. We all seem to agree, however, that making a spectacle of someone else’s suffering is never cool and neither is standing idly by if you are presented with the opportunity to help.
Frieda really does get us thinking, doesn’t she? If she runs across one of the opportunities for us folks outside of Nola to be part of the 9th ward solution, then I’ll make sure we post it here for anyone who is interested.