Rod Dreher's Blog, page 545

The Face Of Louisiana

Mickey, making chili for the hungry in Denham Springs (Photo by Julie Hatcher Ralph)

Posted on Facebook last night by my Starhill friend and neighbor Julie Hatcher Ralph, considered by some to be a saint simply by putting up with that crawfish-eating husband of hers:

The past few days I have been helping out as I could around St. Francisville, which is just the most amazing community that has pulled together like a well-oiled machine to meet each and every need that presents itself here. I got a call yesterday from my friend *** who wanted to come over from Fairhope and bring a car load of supplies and go around doing her thing, interviewing people and telling their stories. So as I started thinking and praying about where we needed to go, something kept urging me to go to Denham Springs. Which I thought was curious because I didn’t really know anyone there, or have any connections there, and I couldn’t imagine how this was going to shake out if Lynn and I just pulled into town searching for a place to serve and plant ourselves for the day.

And then I saw my friend ***’s post on FB late last night about how her church in Mandeville was providing hundreds of lunches today in Denham Springs, so I sent her a message to see if we could plant there. Turns out, it was her friends Mickey and Lanette, who we just happened to have spent some time with last Christmas, who live in Denham Springs, and who were one of the very few homes spared last week. She said Mickey needed some help with meals…needed all hands on deck…and we could be of use.

Well, when we got there around 10 am, they (as in just their family and a couple of friends) were in the process of preparing 300 sack lunches in their home, to take over to their church, to serve people who would “drive thru” and pick them up. See, their church, like most every building in Denham Springs, was flooded and is now contaminated. So no meals can be prepared there. Further, there are no organizations or shelters or donation centers like the Red Cross set up there yet, so the only hope of getting meals and supplies to people (90% whose homes and cars were destroyed), is through people like Mickey and Lanette. So all week long they have worked tirelessly and nearly single-handedly preparing lunch and dinner every single day for around 300 people. Today, those peanut butter sandwiches we made were taken within about 15 minutes,and then luckily we had the sandwiches that St. Timothy sent up, so we didn’t have to turn anyone away. As these people pulled up weary, worn, and wringing with sweat, they took those brown bags with such gratitude….one lady broke down crying saying she just couldn’t believe they were doing this for her. And those were just the people who drove up. Mickey also makes sure that at every meal, he has people (sometimes just his wife and kids) delivering meals around the community to people who either don’t know food is there, or can’t get there because they don’t have cars.

Tonight he made chili. A huge vat of chili under his garage. Again…300 plates assembled at his house, stacked in our cars and delivered to the church to be handed out in the drive-thru and delivered around town. This weekend they’re planning to feed around 1000 people each day.

Neither Mickey nor Lanette are on Facebook, so I’m not sure if they’ll see this. And they probably wouldn’t want the attention anyway because they’re not doing it for any reason other than, that’s just what you do. Their church is destroyed, most of their friends’ homes are destroyed, their schools are closed indefinitely, Mickey’s office is still flooded, but their faith is strong and their compassion is overflowing.

This story is playing out all of Louisiana. It’s just beautiful.

I know now why I went to Denham Springs today. And I’ll be back tomorrow.

Pray for Mickey and Lanette and this wonderful community. And if you’re still looking for a place to help out or send a donation, you can go here to help the church that Mickey and Lanette love and the community they are serving so well.

https://amite.ccbchurch.com/w_give_online.php

 

As I said the other day, we are living through the flood, but it’s also a flood of grace. God spits in the dirt and the mud washes away the blindness of people’s eyes.

Here’s a photo Julie took of one street in Denham Springs. Just one. For miles and miles all around you see streets like this here. People piling most of their worldly possessions on the street, a wet, stinking, steamy trash pile. Each pile represents a family’s life:

Trump On The Bayou

Louisiana right now pic.twitter.com/gdSBqjvnFu

— Campbell Robertson (@campbellnyt) August 19, 2016

Today is the Feast of the Transfiguration on the Orthodox Old Calendar, so I’ve been in church up in Starhill most of the morning. When I got out, I saw on my iPhone that Donald Trump had turned up in Greenwell Springs, in the flood zone, and heard a rumor that he was headed to Livingston Parish. I thought about chasing his entourage to hear what he had to say, but decided I had more important work to do. I’ll hear it through the media.

I’ve just arrived home, and have not yet checked the Trump news, though I’ll do so after I make the point I’m about to make. I don’t want to prejudice my opinion by a read of what he’s already said to the media here. Unless he really blows it (always a possibility), this visit will likely be a big plus for Trump politically, for reasons that J.D. Vance, author of the new #1 New York Times bestseller Hillbilly Elegy, mentioned in his Fresh Air interview a couple of days ago.

Excerpt from that interview:

[HOST TERRY] GROSS:You describe yourself as conservative, and you’ve written for The National Review, a conservative magazine. You’ve become kind of famous for an article or two in which you try to explain why, you know, a lot of poor people would be voting for Trump. And in your writing and in your discussions, you’ve called Trump’s promises the needle in America’s collective vein. You’ve described Trump as the new pain reliever, trying to make comparisons between, you know, narcotizing pain and what Trump is trying to do in explaining things away, easy solutions. Do you know a lot of people who are going to be voting for Trump or – yeah.

VANCE: I do. A lot of people in my family are going to be voting for Trump, a lot of my neighbors and friends from back home. So it’s definitely a phenomenon I, I think, recognize and frankly saw coming pretty early. You know, it’s interesting that I don’t think the Trump phenomenon is exclusively about the white poor.

I think that it’s more about the white working-class folks who aren’t necessarily economically destitute but in some ways feel very culturally isolated and very pessimistic about the future. That’s one of the biggest predictors of whether someone will support Donald Trump – it may be the biggest predictor – is the belief that America is headed in the wrong direction, the belief that your kids are not going to have a better life than you did.

And that cynicism really breeds frustration at political elites, but, frankly, that frustration needs to find a better outlet than Donald Trump. And that’s why I’ve made some of the analogies that I have because I don’t think that he’s going to make the problem better. I think, like you said, he is in some ways a pain reliever. He’s someone who makes people feel a little bit better about their problems. But whether he’s elected president or not, those problems are still going to be there, and we’ve got to recognize that.

GROSS: So when you’re having a discussion about the presidential race with someone in your family, someone who’s going to be voting for Trump, what is that conversation like?

VANCE: It typically starts with me making a point that I just made, which is, look, maybe Trump is recognizing some legitimate problems. He’s talking about the opioid epidemic in a way that nobody else is. But he’s not going to fix the problem. You know, better trade deals is not going to make all of these problems just go away.

And typically my family actually recognizes that. That’s what I find so interesting. They don’t think that this guy is going to solve all their problems. They just think he’s at least trying and he’s saying things, primarily to the elites, that they wish they could say themselves. So it’s really interesting. There’s a recognition that Trump isn’t going to solve a lot of these problems, but he’s, at the end of the day, the only person really trying to tap into this frustration.

And it’s, you know, I – so my dad is a Trump supporter, and I love my dad, and I always say, Dad, you know, Trump is not going to actually make any of these problems better. And he says, well, that’s probably true, but at least he’s talking about them and nobody else is and at least he’s not Mitt Romney. At least he’s not George W. Bush. He’s at least trying to talk about these problems.

And I think it’s amazing how low the bar has been set by the political conversation we’ve had for the past 20 or 30 years that this guy, who many people don’t think is going to solve the problems, is still getting a lot of support from people who are blue-collar white folks.

I find myself exactly where J.D. Vance is politically (as he indicates elsewhere in this interview): unable and unwilling to vote for Hillary Clinton, grateful to Trump for raising issues that standard Republicans have ignored, but having no trust at all in his ability to make any real difference at all in the lives of the people whose hopes he has excited.

Having said that, this is why Trump’s visit today will have been politically smart.

As I’ve been detailing all week, the people in south Louisiana are seething with anger at the national media for ignoring or downplaying the immensity of the suffering we’ve been enduring here since the floods started a week ago today. And not just at the national media: President Obama has been playing golf all week on Martha’s Vineyard while nearly half of Louisiana is underwater, or struggling to make sense of destroyed lives in the wake of the flood. He hasn’t said diddly about it, nor, except for one tweet, has Hillary Clinton, despite her big talk at the Democratic convention about how we’re all stronger together. She (or rather, her staff) found it more compelling to tweet about US women gold medal winners in Rio than tens of thousands of Louisianans now homeless.

I have not seen a poll, obviously, but anecdotally, I can tell you that lots of people here are furious at elites in the national media and in national politics, and I’m talking liberal Democrats here in the Bayou State too. The broad feeling is that we don’t matter to them, that we are just a bunch of rednecks and coonasses and country people in flyover country whose problems are far less interesting than Donald Trump’s tweets and Ryan Lochte’s misdemeanors. Trump has been part of this dynamic too in the past week, more preoccupied with his self-demeaning, pissy fight with the media than in paying attention to the country he supposedly wants to govern.

But unlike the president or Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump is here today, viewing the devastation and visiting with victims and relief workers. Donald Trump is at present not in a position to do anything other than write a personal check for relief work. If he were president, as a bureaucratic matter, he probably couldn’t do much more than what Barack Obama is doing, which is to open the floodgates of federal disaster aid. But as a presidential candidate, he has done something much appreciated, besides bringing the media down here to show the rest of the country more of what we’re dealing with: he has shown us respect.

In June, only five days after the horrendous massacre at Orlando’s gay nightclub, Obama went to Orlando to console the relatives and friends of the dead. As CNN reported at the time:

The role of consoler in chief was a repeat assignment for Obama, was has now traveled to 10 American cities — including four in the last year — scarred by mass shooting events. In Orlando, he met at a downtown arena with both families of victims and survivors of the terrorist attack, many of whom suffered serious injuries but emerged from the massacre alive.

I applaud Obama for going to Orlando, and for going to all these places. It’s part of his job. But it has not escaped notice here that Obama has managed to beat a path to the sites of horrible events like the one in Orlando, but he hasn’t even emerged from his Martha’s Vineyard vacation to make as much as a public statement about Louisiana’s suffering. Why don’t we merit the same respect?

Maybe it’s true that, as Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards said yesterday, it would be too much of a hassle to the rebuilding efforts to have to deal with a presidential visit right now. I don’t believe that for a second. If the president wanted to come, he could come. Everybody knows that. Louisiana just isn’t a priority to him, at least not as much of a priority as the golf greens on Martha’s Vineyard.

You can call it mere political theatrics if you want, but symbolism is important. It’s very important. There are some things you can’t just phone in, or demonstrate by sending a card and flowers. Not sure how it is where you live, but around here, going to a wake or funeral is called “paying your respects” to the dead and his family. There is nothing you can do to bring the dead back. Maybe you’ve sent food or flowers to the family, or made a generous donation to his favorite charity. All that is great. But there’s no substitute for being there. One’s presence says, “I am sharing your suffering. You matter to me.”

Once again, here’s J.D. Vance from Fresh Air. We are not “hill people,” but this is very much true of the culture of south Louisiana, by the way:

And when I was a kid, the first time I realized that there was something really unique about Jackson and its people, as I write in the book – there was a funeral motorcade passing by. And my grandma said, we have to get out. We have to stand at attention. And I said, you know, why, Mamaw? Why are we all doing this? Why does everybody stop and stand at attention when a funeral motorcade passes? And she said because, honey, we’re hill people, and we respect our dead. And it made me realize that there was something very important about this identity of hill people that both my grandma and the rest of Jacksonians took on as a certain, you know, as a certain self-identifier.

Here in Louisiana, I’ve never seen anybody get out of the car when a funeral motorcade passes, but people do pull over if they can, and if they can’t, they turn on their headlights as a sign of respect. Not as many people do it as used to, but it’s still done. It’s considered low-class and callous not to.

J.D. Vance’s people are Scots-Irish, as are a lot of people in my part of Louisiana (the Cajuns are a different people). Scots-Irish culture is very, very proud. They cannot stand taking charity from anybody. It’s a shame/honor culture. In J.D.’s book, he talks about white welfare scammers he knew back home who had convinced themselves that they weren’t scamming at all, that welfare cheats were other people, not themselves. The point is, it’s considered shameful not to be able to do for yourself. One of my friends who has been going out into Livingston Parish this week doing relief work said the church team has encountered lots of people who wanted to pay for the free dinners they were passing out. These are people who have lost their houses, and probably didn’t have insurance. Still, they considered it shameful to take a hot meal from a church. They did so, in the end, but that little fact tells you a lot about the culture of a people. They have been rendered all but helpless by the flood, and they despise that about themselves.

There is a connection between that feeling and the incredible sense of personal and communal responsibility you’ve seen around here in the past week — of the Cajun Navy rushing into the flood waters in their boats to rescue people. Of folks setting up shelters without waiting for the government to tell them what to do. Of churches not waiting for instructions from on high, but responding instantly. After church in St. Francisville today, I stopped by a local hotel to check on a friend who had been flooded out of his house. Talking to the manager, she said the hotel was jammed with flood refugees.

“I tell you what,” she said, “that Methodist church and Healing Place [a non-denominational charismatic church] have been coming through every day. They have been feeding people, now. It’s something.”

It’s not just the Methodist church and Healing Place alone. I know that other churches in town, like the Baptists and the Episcopalians, have been very active too. She was just mentioning the ones who have been into her hotel. I’m sure the churches have divided the hotels in town up among themselves. The point is, for all our many problems, there is still a strong civil society down here, and you’re seeing it in action now. Most people — not everybody, but most people — are moved not only by a sense of compassion, but by a sense of respect: respect for their neighbors, respect for virtue, and respect for themselves. You do not want to be the kind of man or woman who looks away from your neighbor’s travails, and does nothing, and gives nothing, even though you have things you could do or give. It’s low-down.

So, look, about respect: if you are in south Louisiana this week, and you are witnessing all around you suffering like this state hasn’t seen since Katrina, and you personally know someone (usually more than one person or one family) who lost a house or more — and just about everyone knows somebody like that — you are overwhelmed by the enormity of it all. You know too that this is not going to end quickly, that tens of thousands of people here have months and months of agony to endure. You don’t understand why outsider elites in the news media and in national political leadership don’t seem to care. It’s a great thing that the president wrote us a check — seriously, it is needed and appreciated — but there’s no substitute for showing up. There’s just not.

President Obama has not shown up. He’s been golfing instead. Maybe it’s just me, but I hope he doesn’t come now. He’s shown his hand already.

Donald Trump was late to get here, but he’s here now. What’s Hillary Clinton’s excuse?

Trump no doubt certainly came here out of crass political motive, but the point is, he came. 

The fact that so many people in the elite national media, and among elites generally, don’t understand why this matters only validates the sense of alienation and outsiderness that gave rise to Trump in the first place, and that kept the media and the GOP elites in Washington from seeing him rise. I’m reading things online, people saying things like, “Surely nobody in Louisiana thinks Trump is going to do a thing for them. They can’t be that stupid, can they?” No, we’re not that stupid. But really, are you so dumb and disconnected from what it means to be human that you can’t understand that there’s more to life than writing a check and sending out government bureaucrats to fix things? Read your J.D. Vance!

OK. Having written that, I just checked Google News to see what’s being written about Trump’s visit. From the Washington Post‘s dispatch:

“We knew you’d be here, Mr. Trump! We knew you would be here for us!” one young woman shouted.

“We lost everything, but we knew you would come! This makes it all worthwhile,” said another woman.

And:

Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, said Friday that she spoke with [La. Gov. John Bel] Edwards by telephone and called the situation in Louisiana heartbreaking. She also made a thinly-veiled reference to Trump’s visit and the questions about Obama not coming to the region.

“My heart breaks for Louisiana, and right now, the relief effort can’t afford any distractions,” Clinton, the Democratic nominee, said in a statement posted on Facebook. “The very best way this team can help is to make sure Louisianans have the resources they need.”

Boom, there it is.

Assuming that it really would make things more difficult for Obama to be here this week, he could at least use his bully pulpit from Martha’s Vineyard to talk about our situation. But honestly, Hillary Clinton has no excuse at all. If Trump can fly in on a dime, visit a relief operation at a church, drive around some of the devastated area, what’s her problem?

UPDATE: Reader Buck Farmer comments:

It is good Trump showed up. I despise the man, I fear for what disease he represents for our society and our Republic, but I am glad he showed up.

I grew up in New Orleans. After Katrina, my family fled with three or four others to friends in Baton Rouge. The loss, the confusion, the helplessness combined into a staggering unreality. One of us refugees who used to have a restaurant coped with it by cooking gumbo. That was the best I have ever had, and I would not be surprised if it is marked in my memory as the best I will ever have.

One of our hosts is in hospice now. My mother wants to visit, but the interstate is closed. We all know the importance of being present.

I’ve lived among and within the global transnational elite for nearly a decade now, nestled in the cosmopolis that knits together that “fabled nexus of money, influence, and condescension” that makes every world city parochially similar. I believe in the good of the Cathedral that neo-reactionaries scorn, in liberalism, in prioritizing humanity above our tribes, in the fundamental priority of personhood. I am a universalist in the tradition that stretches back to the struggles of early Christianity even if my universalism has abandoned much that is Christian.

And despite all that, I am beggared to explain the obliviousness of my fellow elites. We need Jonathan Haidt’s message and J.D. Vance’s. There is more that binds us together than keeps us apart. A society that has an “unnecessariat” is not a human society.

Our media has abdicated any duty for the welfare of the whole in favor of the entertainment of the individual and the reinforcement of the banalities of an atomized and stunted life.

Thank you, Rod, for continuing to cover the situation on the ground.

UPDATE.2: Uncle Chuckie comments:

I think you are touching on it but still missing why this is so important for the Trump image and what he means to people.

“We knew you would come.”

It was not, “Thank you for coming.” It was, “We knew you would come.”

Abandoned by the media. Ignored by the President and the Clinton thing. Forgotten, left to die in the muck and their ruined homes. But not forgotten. There is one man who does not forget. One man who cares. And they knew he would not forget them. He would come. And he did.

Yes, for us cynics a cynical, political gesture. But not for the people who said that. They put their faith in him and he did not fail them. Don’t waste time talking about Obama’s FEMA director. Forget Hillary who can barely stand up much less risk getting the cuffs of her pantsuit dirty. Forget all the rhetoric about things that the voters could not care less about.

Remember this. The image of a giant of man standing in the dirt hugging someone who has lost everything saying that everything was going to be all right because he was there and he had not forgotten them when everyone else has.

And when Hillary watches the returns on election night knowing that prison doors await her, when the pollsters shake their heads wondering how they could have been so wrong, when Trump wins, know that this image, and the words, “We knew you would come,” was the reason.

I don’t believe Trump will win, not by a mile. But Uncle Chuckie has spoken truth here.

Send Ryan Lochte Back To Rio

First of all, let me get this off my chest. You knew I was going to say something like this, but Dan Rather says it with so much more authority:

You would have to be the most incompetent or most uninterested journalist in the world to fail to find stories down here in this drama. For example, right under my own nose this morning, I can’t rouse my boys early to go to church (today is the Feast of the Transfiguration). I don’t think it’s because they’re too tired from mucking all day yesterday. I think they’re too shaken up by what they saw of the destruction of people’s lives by the flood, especially the old lady who nearly died of a heatstroke in her flooded home, right in front of their eyes. The younger of my sons is crying this morning, saying he couldn’t sleep at all last night. I believe him. And these are kids who did not lose their home, like so many, many others like them have.

This is emotionally difficult for the boys, but this is a good experience for them. They need to know what our neighbors are going through, and they need to have the experience of serving them in their hour of great need. A friend of mine in St. Francisville wrote on his Facebook page:

Here’s a shot of the group my friend and his grandson worked with: a Cajun Navy crew that saved old folks from a flooded nursing home. I don’t know the people in the photo, but Facebook indicates that one of these two men is named Ryan Evans:

So that’s one Ryan for you, doing what men, not punks, do — as well as one very young man, a boy named J.J., learning what it is to be a man. These things are happening everywhere here in Louisiana, right now. We have a whole generation of kids who are too young to remember Katrina, and who are having to go through this the first time. Those kids fortunate enough not to have lost their homes are learning from their parents and grandparents, and through hands-on experience, what their (our) debt of love is to our neighbors who did.

Here is the story of another American named Ryan — US Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte, 32, a privileged, gold medal-winning man-child who, in a night of drunken partying, abused the hospitality of his Brazilian hosts, grossly insulted them, lied about it in the international media and caused scandal to them, and who has finally been revealed for the lying punk that he is. He brought shame onto his nation, and owes the Brazilians a public apology, at the very least.

I wish they would send Lochte back to Brazil to face up to what he has done. Maybe the Brazilians will agree to stand down from extradition in exchange for Lochte spending the next month here in the subtropics, helping people muck their houses. Maybe it will teach him something. Sounds like this 32-year-old has a lot to learn about manhood from a 10-year-old Louisiana boy named J.J.

As for the news media, who have made Ryan Lochte and his spoiled-child act into days of headlines, well, I’m afraid they are beyond rehabilitation.

Calling Baton Rouge Area Readers (Urgent)

In a previous post, I mentioned that a crew from Sequitur Classical Academy were working on mucking an elderly lady’s flooded house today, when they discovered that she had collapsed from a heat stroke, and was near death. My two boys were part of the crew. They all kept her alive until paramedics could arrive, and they ferried the EMTs across the water to the house, as well as led them, and the lady, back across the water to the ambulance. It was a very close call for the lady, who is doing fine tonight in the hospital.

The crew was not able to finish today, but is headed back tomorrow. If you are in the BR area and want to help finish mucking this dear lady’s house, here’s what to do, according to a note just sent out by Brian Daigle, the crew leader and school headmaster:

We will be returning tomorrow morning at 9am. We could use lots of help. Below is the plan and what to bring:

1) Arrive around 9am. You will need to go down the side road next to Ruffino’s (Sotile Dr.) Park in the culdesac.

2) Bring gloves, wheelbarrows, crow bars (to pull up one room of wood flooring), brooms to sweep and buckets to haul drywall. All carpet was pulled today and we knocked out all drywall. We mainly have drywall, sheetrock, and mud to haul. After, we will sweep the floors as cleanly as possible.

3) Be ready to walk through 2-4 feet of water to get to and from the house.

4) Bring plenty of fluids. No power in the house. Very hot.

With enough folks, we can be done by noon. And then we can head to another house. No need to let me know if you’re coming. I hope we have a good crew.

Come help! There’s so much to be done. Tomorrow is a feast day of the Orthodox Church (Old Calendar), so we will be in St. Francisville at liturgy in the morning. None of us will see you there. But if you’re available and eager to help, you know where to go.

I have to say this about today. I knew my kids would be getting a strong education in virtue by being a part of the Sequitur community. I just didn’t expect it to be so intense, and so hands-on. Note well: this is the school headmaster leading these boys. The Greek teacher spent much of the past week as part of the Cajun Navy, rescuing people with his boat. What stunning examples of manly Christian virtue these men are to the boys of the school. Sequitur is breeding men with chests.

I cannot ever remember being so proud of a community of which I am a member. Nora, my nine-year-old daughter, was not with a Sequitur crew today, but was at the Amite Baptist Church with our Starhill neighbor Julie Ralph (who was one of the large crew of West Feliciana women working all week to help our parish) and her kids today, making food for hungry and homeless Livingston Parish people.

When she got home, I asked her what she had learned from the day spent serving those folks.

“That anything can happen,” she said. “And I learned that we really need each other. I love Louisiana. It’s like we’re part of one family.”

Obama & The National Media: A View From Louisiana

A reader e-mails:

This was posted on FB by Heather Cross, an attorney at Baker Donelson here in Baton Rouge. I thought it hit all the reasons we are so disappointed (and disgusted) with the lack of interest our disaster is receiving.  

Dear CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, ABC News, CBS News, Good Morning America, the Today Show and whatever other news organizations professing to employ people who refer to themselves as Journalists:

cc: all Facebook Friends (as promised)

FYI There is a flood in Louisiana.

You’ve met us before. You came and camped out over here during a very painful period in our existence about a month ago. You went into a neighborhood you’ve never been in, in a state it’s quite possible that you’ve never visited (despite that you are “very well-travelled”). Although, I realize you are sophisticated, and accepting of “other” cultures, you managed to pass judgment on an entire community in your own country, who were mourning and struggling to figure out – what the hell just happened – and where do we go from here – all of us (well most of us) – in good faith. You didn’t offer help, you didn’t offer support, you offered criticism – and then you left.

Oh you came back, a few weeks later, a lunatic, who also had never been here, showed up and murdered three of our finest citizens. In broad daylight. In the middle of town. You came back. With more criticism. More speculation. More side taking. When in the community I live, we were basically all on the same side. We’re all in this together. I hate to pull a hashtag, but seriously #unBRoken.

Not one person I watched on the national news during the weeks following Alton Sterling’s death, or the murder of three police officers gave my friends, my family, my neighbors – any credit or the benefit of the doubt. Nope. The entire news media looked for someone to blame. Depending on what network you watched the target of blame was Sterling himself, the cops, the South, the guns, the whatever. Not one person I watched on the national news assumed that the whole city was by and large, and in good faith, just trying to wrap our brains around what happened, and trying to make our city whole again.

I think you people are stone cold silent about this flood, because really, there’s no agenda to push. There’s no side to take. There’s nobody to blame. So even though you don’t seem in the least bit curious, here’s what’s been happening around here since you left.

First – as previously stated. There was a Noah’s Ark Level Flood. It affected all of us. Black, white, dog, cat, man, woman, child, transsexual.

While it was still raining, a spontaneous, private, and well-meaning navy of ordinary people assembled themselves. They were black, white, asian and otherwise. They weren’t protesting anything. They got into their own boats, spent their own money, spent their own time, risked their own lives. Black people saved white people. White people saved black people. Nobody asked what color you were before knocking on your door. These are not first responders on some list somewhere. These are a bunch of guys who like to hunt and fish and as a result own flat bottom boats and they assumed that the actual police and other first responders, not to mention their fellow citizens – could use a little help. So they just showed up. Nobody told them to. They wanted to.

Meanwhile, across town, a spontaneous, private and well-meaning army of ordinary people assembled themselves in a 7 warehouse, un-airconditioned sound stage. (And FYI, it’s REALLY hot in August in Louisiana). They found some fans. And they had plenty of room. They gathered canned goods, bottled water, Gatorade, Neosporin, BandAids, Toothbrushes, deodorant, hairspray, sleeping bags, chairs and pillows. They set up kitchens with their tailgating party supplies. Nobody told them to. They just did it. Why? All because people who just lost everything about a half hour ago, got plucked off of their rooftops in helicopters and this army knew that they needed somewhere to go, and something to eat. Pretty much instinctively.

Meanwhile, across town, people who usually lived as one family unit in well-kept homes slept on air mattresses in friends homes watching flood waters threaten every memory, every belonging, every photograph, everything they spent their whole lives building, every spot their child took their first step become over-run with ruin, knowing it would be months, if not years before they clean up the mess. People who lost homes in Katrina, went through the same thing again. People who don’t own much to speak of, have nowhere to return to. All of these people woke up in a place where they have nowhere to send their kids to school. Indefinitely. All of these people I’ve seen, are sad, they are tired – but they are resilient – they are smiling.

We have not even begun to count our dead, much less bury them, and we’re still in mourning over the events from last months. For the love of goodness the least you could do is offer us a little encouragement.

I suppose a bunch of self-sufficient folks that actually love one another, and are trying to figure things out isn’t as interesting to you as casting gross stereotypes over people who live fly-over country. But we are a little bit baffled after all that unwanted attention we got a few weeks back, when we actually need you to get the word out, you are nowhere to be found.

As much as it pains me to ask, we need you to shine a light on this. There are people here who need help. Let’s take a time out from monitoring Donald Trump’s Twitter Feed and deal with this one. We need attention because we cannot rebuild our infrastructure, our schools, our homes, our businesses without the money that the attention will bring. So here is what we need you to explain to people that don’t live in Louisiana:

1) This water damage was caused by rain. Not a tidal surge. There’s a difference. I don’t have lots of time to explain, it – but the main difference is, that this is such a bad ass amount of rain that it only happens every 1000 years. Yes. One thousand years.

2) As a result of how infrequently this happens (yes every 1000 years) Nobody knew this was coming. We thought it would rain. We did not realize we would get almost three feet of rain in some places. 14 trillion gallons water is now trying to drain out of rivers, and bayous and ditches that are stretched beyond capacity. Think about that. Where’s all the water gonna go? Hell I don’t really know, but I can tell you this on its trip to the Gulf of Mexico (which is incidentally where a lot of your rainwater goes) – it’s gonna travel over places it hasn’t been for one-thousand-years. Sometimes that’s the first floor of your house. Sometimes – it’s the only floor of your house. Sometimes its your entire business. That supports you, and supports others. Either way, you have no place to inhabit for months because you can’t live in a house that’s been covered in water or sell your wares out of a store that nobody can get to.

3) This flood affected people from every walk of life. It did not discriminate between the good side of town, or the bad side of town. It was an equal opportunity offender. It just tried to ruin half a state. Despite what you may think, we’re fairly united against this slithering, slimy common enemy. We have only just begun to figure out how to dig our way out. Maybe you can help us figure it out. At this point, we’re open to suggestions, or at least some assistance in ripping out wet sheetrock.

4) You can buy maximum value flood insurance, and it will not – repeat not – cover the cost of the average price of a home in East Baton Rouge Parish. Plus, notably, flood insurance must be purchased separately from regular homeowners/property insurance. Most Homeowners insurance policies will cover you if you suffer any other form of natural disaster – by that I mean earthquakes, tornadoes and wildfires. But for some reason, not floods. Nope. That is limited. There are maps that insurance companies have where they think it could possibly flood. There are uninsured houses right now, that are in a place that some beancounter in an insurance company did not think it would flood. Maybe someone could check out what the hell is going on with flood insurance. We certainly talk a lot about health insurance.

5) There’s stuff we have that cannot be replaced.

6) Al Sharpton, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, President Obama, Kim Kardasian, and others – are nowhere to be found. (Although props to Taylor Swift for the cool million she sent us).

This education is sorely needed because the few, and I mean very few, articles I have been able to locate on the national news have said nothing about the above 6 points. But the best part? The comments. They clarify how uneducated the rest of the United States is about Louisiana (while usually, and ironically calling the people in Louisiana uneducated). In addition to the fact that “environmentalists” who love the Earth do not realize that Baton Rouge is NOT on the coast or below sea level (my favorite irony), these people think we are cultural Neanderthals. They don’t realize that we have our own music, food, language and culture. It’s a gift, and we are grateful and proud of it. It’s your fault you won’t take the time to understand it – not mine.

However, the recurring criticism and/or question from these “commentators” is why don’t these people just move? I have two responses to you.

The First, by way of example: Remember the Tsunami that happened in Thailand? A bunch of people on expensive vacations got mowed down by an unpredictable, unforeseeable weather event. Not once did I hear anyone ask: why would you go on vacation where there could be a Tsunami? Nope. All the people I know were too busy praying novenas and donating money to go to some country they may never see to stop and ask such a thing.

The more significant reason we don’t move away is because this is the kind of place that prays novenas and sends money to places we’ve never been in the hope of sending help and comfort to people we have never met. We are the kind of people that assemble a volunteer army, and a volunteer navy whose sole mission is to spread love, support and a hot meal to our neighbors and community. We’re dropped off in a shelter with a couple thousand of our new friends, and honestly still find a way to laugh together. The Cajun Uber joke on Facebook is priceless. That’s it. Our joie de vie is in our DNA, and it grows out of this soil, and it is contagious. But only in this place. On this little part of muddy earth. We know all our cousins. We live a block from our grandparents. Plus the food is really, really good.

Come hell or high water, we’re not going anywhere. You’re welcome to visit anytime. We promise, no matter what, we will love you anyway, we will always send rescue, and we will always find a way to make you smile. And after all that we will, most definitely, feed you.

Love,

The State of Louisiana

#unBRoken

#CNN #FoxNews #MSNBC #ABCNews #CBSNews #GoodMorningAmerica #TodayShow #Louisianastrong #historicflood2016″

I know you readers are bound to be tired of hearing this from me, and if so, it won’t hurt my feelings if you quit reading it. But I feel the need to convey how strong this feeling Heather Cross expresses is down here. I don’t know if Ms. Cross is a Republican or a Democrat, and I’m not even going to look it up to see, because I am hearing the very same complaints from both Democratic and Republican friends.

This city was overrun by national media when Alton Sterling was shot, and when there were protests. We looked bad on national television, night after night. And you know, there are racial problems here, like there are in just about every place in America. I don’t believe we should turn away from them, but rather should face them as honestly, as courageously, and as charitably as we can. I can’t say I blame the national media for taking such a hard look at things here in Baton Rouge back then.

But where are you people now, when everywhere you look you can find black folks and white folks loving on each other, helping each other through this crisis. The Department of Justice and many other agencies of the executive branch overseen by He Who Cannot Be Troubled To Leave Martha’s Vineyard issued a long bureaucratic memo on Tuesday lecturing us that we had better not discriminate against people in our disaster relief efforts. They say they have evidence that it happened during Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita, and it has happened in other big disasters. I’m sure it did, and that is wrong. We have to own our mistakes, learn from them, and make it right.

Still, it’s more than a little jarring to have spent time in a shelter watching people of all races working their asses off to help people of all races in their hour of great and overwhelming need, and to be seeing in our local media abundant evidence of the same thing, of people in our community pulling together, and … well, I’ll let my friend Jimmy speak for me:

Not many things get me seething, but this does. The narrative of this Administration as dividers instead of uniters is real. Look no further than this “guidance” press release telling us in the middle of it to be sure not to be racist, y’all. Meanwhile, our President enjoys golfing and Martha’s Vineyard and sunny skies. No visits, not even that reviled Bush flyover. Just politically motivated, racially laced memos. Meanwhile, we’ll keep on keeping on. Thanks, Obama.

You longtime readers know I’ve never been much of an Obama basher. I didnt vote for him, but I think he was a much better president than McCain would have been, and in general, I don’t think he’s a whole lot worse than Romney would have been (for the record, I didn’t vote for either GOP presidential candidate either). I have always believed that Obama is a good and decent man, even as I have hated some of his policies. So it comes as a surprise to me how strongly I feel about him and his fundraising + golfing vacation while we are in such trouble here in Louisiana. But it’s not just him, of course, but what he and the media represent: an establishment disconnected from the people over which they rule.

If the president does manage to make it down here, he’ll surely find somebody to feed him (BRPD officers were driving around an African-American neighborhood today, delivering plates of jambalaya to black people mucking their houses), because this state is full of way better people than the likes of me. If it were up to me, I’d tell him to go to Circle K, buy himself a bag of Chee-wees, and get on back home before he’s poisoned by contact with one of us racist bitter clingers.

Trump’s coming tomorrow. We’ll see what that’s like. I’m not a Trump fan, as you know, but at least he’s showing up to see what’s going on.

What he’ll see, I hope, are one of the countless scenes like the ones my kids were part of today. I’m telling you this not to brag on my kids. Lots of Louisiana kids are doing this kind of thing, in part because their parents want them to know what it means to be part of a community, and to help folks who are helpless. My daughter spent the day at Amite Baptist church preparing meals for people who have no home, while volunteer crews tore out the water-logged carpet and pews. My boys were part of a crew from their school who have been going out to muck houses of school families who were flooded out. They had to boat in to this one elderly woman’s house (her grandchild goes to the boys’ school) to take out drywall, pull up carpet and floorboards, and suchlike — this, in 91 degree heat, in humidity over 90 percent. While they were there, the elderly lady collapsed with a heat stroke inside the house. My older son called 911, and the crew boated across the water to pick up the paramedics and take them to the house while the others used ice from their coolers to try to keep her alive. They boated her and the paramedics back across the water to the ambulance. The lady made it, thank God, but it was a very close call. All the boys working on the mucking crew who saved her life learned a valuable lesson today. My boys came home in clothes stinking of sewage water, with aching muscles and stories to tell.

Meanwhile, on Martha’s Vineyard today, the president played golf with Larry David. Same planet, different worlds.

I would like to remind President Obama of his words in a New Orleans campaign speech the first time he was running for president. Here’s the short clip from 2008, below this hypocrite’s quote. And the same media who rightly read Bush the riot act over his reaction to Katrina are letting Obama slide. They too are hypocrites. All of them smell worse than that pile of filthy stinking clothes in the image that leads this piece. Anyway, here’s what then-Sen. Obama told a New Orleans audience in 2008:

We talk about levees that couldn’t hold, about a FEMA that seemed not just incompetent but paralyzed and powerless, about a president who only saw the people from the window of an airplane instead of down here on the ground, trying to provide comfort and aid.

Where’s Barry? Not In Louisiana

My wife just came back from delivering things to Livingston Parish. “No matter how bad you think it is, the reality is worse,” she said. “The are entire subdivisions where everything people own is in a massive pile out on the curb. People look like they’ve been beaten.”

Meanwhile, on Martha’s Vineyard this week, President Obama found time in his vacation schedule to show up for a Democratic fundraiser. The AP reported:

Democrats Hank Goldberg and his wife, Carol Brown Goldberg, hosted the event at their home in Chilmark, the same town where the president is renting a vacation home. About 60 Obama and Clinton supporters paid between $10,000 and $33,400 to attend the event that was held in a tent on the sprawling property. Servers wore white aprons that said, ‘‘Thank You, President Obama.’’

The proceeds will benefit Clinton’s campaign, the Democratic National Committee, and state parties across the country.

I suppose that tens of thousands of Louisiana flood victims lost all their “Thank You, President Obama” garments in the water. I bet that the pile of money the president raised for the Democrats — at least $600,000 by those figures, but probably considerably more — would go a long way towards buying homeless refugees clean t-shirts at Wal-mart.

Meanwhile, the Baton Rouge Advocate editorializes about the president’s absence. Excerpts:

We’ve seen this story before in Louisiana, and we don’t deserve a sequel. In 2005, a fly-over by a vacationing President George W. Bush became a symbol of official neglect for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. The current president was among those making political hay out of Bush’s aloofness.

Sometimes presidential visits can get in the way of emergency response, doing more harm than good. But we don’t see that as a factor now that flood waters are subsiding, even if at an agonizing pace. It’s past time for the president to pay a personal visit, showing his solidarity with suffering Americans.

More:

And if the president can interrupt his vacation for a swanky fundraiser for fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton, as he did on Monday, then surely he can make time to show up for a catastrophe that’s displaced thousands.

Oh hell yes.

By the way, as far as I can tell, Louisiana’s Democratic governor, John Bel Edwards, seems to be doing a great job with this crisis.

Mucker’s Diary

A Baton Rouge reader of this blog, a friend of mine, texted me yesterday from Livingston Parish, where the water has receded, and where he went to help colleagues clean their flood-damaged houses. He was pretty torn up by the devastation. Livingston, you may recall, is a place where the sheriff said 90 percent of homes went underwater. That means more than 100,000 people homeless in that one parish alone. Twenty parishes have been declared disaster areas, though I think none are as bad off as Livingston.

I asked my friend to write what he saw for this blog. He did, late last night. I publish it here honoring his request to be anonymous. What he says here could be the words of thousands, even tens of thousands, of south Louisiana people today:

As Rod mentioned in an earlier post, as part of my job I visited five different homes in the Baton Rouge area today with my boss. We wanted to check on the people we work with and make sure that they have what they need to get their houses cleaned up. The first three homes we visited were in Denham Springs, a thriving suburb a few miles east of Baton Rouge.

If you weren’t paying attention, you might not have realized that the entire city was underwater 48 hours ago. There was no more water and it was a bright, sunny day. And the weird thing about floods is that they tend to leave the exterior of a building looking the same, while utterly destroying the inside. Often the only telltale mark on the exterior is a line where the water stopped rising. Those exterior appearances are incredibly deceiving.

As we came into town from the interstate exit, the first thing we noticed was the businesses. They were all being torn apart from the inside out. There was a dentist’s office on the right of the road where all of the dental chairs and machines were now sitting in the parking lot, waiting to be trashed. A funeral home was clearing out its pews and furniture. A Baptist church had a heap of trash out front – all of their electronics in a pile, carpet sitting out of the main entrance. The Home Depot, which must have had 8-10 feet of water, had all of their stuff pulled out into a parking lot. Some of the big chains, like Burger King, were back in business, but we often forget how many small businesses there are and on the road in they were all in deep trouble.

That was just a preamble for what we saw when we got to the neighborhoods.

After a flood a homeowner is in a race against time. Mold and mildew can set in within 48-72 hours and will grow on most anything that is wet. If you want to save your house so that it will be livable after it is repaired, you have to remove anything porous that was under the water. If you don’t, you’ll have a newly renovated house with a mildew problem. Carpet, drywall, and insulation are your enemy. The first thing you have to do is pull any wet furniture out of the house, as almost none of it is salvageable. Mattresses, couches, and futons, heavy and laden with water, have to go. So the first part of your life that ends up in the street are all the things that made you comfortable, a preview of the discomfort to come.

Next to go is the carpet, linoleum, and other flooring (only ceramic tile seems exempt). I took out some carpet from a house yesterday that had been under 2.5 feet of water. Except it wasn’t just river water, but also raw sewage. That wasn’t mud I was looking at and I still don’t have the smell out of my nose. Pulling that carpet up and dragging it out to the street was some of the nastiest work I’ve ever done. But it joins the furniture on the front lawn. It has to.

Finally, you have to demolish the drywall at least a foot above the water line and then pull out the insulation, which may have wicked water above the flood line. All of that goes out to the street too. Eventually you’ll have to spray some kind of mildewcide on all of the wall surfaces. Because the power is likely to be out, you’ll be doing this without air conditioning on a hot, humid Louisiana day. Around here this whole process is called “mucking”.

Optimally, you want to muck your house within just a few days of the water receding. It is difficult, hot, exhausting work and it overwhelms people.

So by the time we arrived at our first location, the mucking process was well under way. Almost every house had a lawn full of trash that had been removed from the house. Every house had the telltale water mark about three feet up the wall. House, after house, after house. Thank goodness for Google maps, because the mailbox had been knocked over by the water, but we finally found our location. The house was on the right, and a line of furniture, carpet, and drywall about five feet tall leaned over to our left, like a levee in reverse, proof that water always wins.

The couple we visited have lived there for twenty-five years. They were living there with their daughter and one-year-old grandson. By the time we arrived, they were so far along with the mucking that all that remained was about four feet of drywall from the top of the ceiling to the middle of the wall. They had pulled out all of their kitchen cabinets and countertops. All of the appliances were out by the street too. Their daughter’s car had been completely submerged. Twenty-five years of life in one house and pretty much the only stuff they could salvage could fit on the floor of the carport, where it was drying out. Everything else was across the street.

It is easy for us to say, “it is only stuff,” but it is often the memories and sentiments that we attach to stuff that makes it valuable. At the house I helped at yesterday, the teenage son brought out his first Bible. He had another Bible in his locker at school and probably hadn’t looked at this old Bible for years, but yet he couldn’t let it go. We might be able to replace the book, but we can’t really replace the memories that are attached to it. But out to the lawn it goes, as water has no mercy when it comes to paper.

By the time someone is done mucking, virtually the whole life of their family is festering in the heat on their lawn (and who knows how long it will be there, as it will take forever for it to get picked up). Often you can salvage clothing, your dishes, and anything that was up high. But you have to disinfect all of it too.

We traveled to our second house, again passing house after house that had been turned inside out. Her house only had a few inches of water, but still the baseboards, carpet, and drywall were on their way out, along with her furniture. A single woman, she had two friends helping her and two of our co-workers. When she saw my boss she broke down in tears and hugged her for a long time. One of the things I saw today and yesterday was how overwhelmed people were by the task ahead of them. Most of them were barely holding it together and were desperate for help. Some were so overwhelmed by the enormity of the work that they just froze and didn’t do anything or weren’t doing the most important things. People respond in completely unpredictable ways.

The owner of the third place in Denham Springs was not home, so we moved back to Baton Rouge. The first place we visited was in the far east of Baton Rouge, off of O’Neal Lane. This time what I noticed was the foliage. All of the trees had a film of mud about 6-8 feet up, so I realized that the car we were driving in would have been underwater a few days ago. We were now about five miles west of our previous locations, but this part of the city had also been decimated. Again, as we entered the neighborhood, the signs of mucking were everywhere. No house had been untouched by the floods. Whereas the first homeowner was ahead of schedule in his race against time, this one is behind, with the floors still intact in many places and none of the walls removed; I worry that the mildew will win.

Finally we made it to Sherwood Forest, which I had already described to Rod as “a middle-class Ninth Ward.” As Rod pointed out, almost 15,000 people live in this neighborhood, which had never been flooded. It’s a solid middle class neighborhood, but not a place of real wealth. Lots of two-parent families, but two parents who work. Compared to my first visit yesterday the mucking was in full bloom, with little levees of trash divided only by driveways. This family is in about the middle of the pack in their race against time, with most of the flooring out, but all of the drywall intact. They hope to have some more family arrive to help tomorrow.

One of the great questions of philosophy is, “What is a good life?” I often tell people that move here that Louisiana, especially southern Louisiana, is a state that tends to answer that question differently than the rest of our country. Our dysfunctions are well documented, but the answer to that question in Louisiana revolves around family, food, and helping each other out, not always about being wealthy, cultured, or isolated from your family. As I have joked more than once, in Dallas the current status symbol is owning a Tesla, in Louisiana it is owning a Yeti cooler. As a student I knew once explained Louisiana masculinity to me, “In Louisiana you aren’t really a man unless you can feed fifty people at once.”

Which is why the other thing I saw today were rows of trucks along the streets, where family and friends were arriving to help with the mucking. Almost every house had one or two vehicles out front that belonged to family or friends. You could usually see several people shuttling trash out of the houses. I saw one older couple sitting out on a bench while their children and grandchildren were pulling stuff out. In fact, as I’ve tried to find volunteers to help with mucking, the near universal response has been, “I have to go help my family,” or “I have to go help one of my friends.” It’s the same spirit that gave rise to the Cajun Navy when the waters were rising. One of the reasons that more people aren’t in shelters is because they have family or friends living with them, though that adds a level of difficulty to the mucking process, as you have to travel from one place to another to get to your house.

So for the next few days thousands of people will be in a race for time. More than even money, what people need between now and Monday is help. With the right tools (a carpet knife, a pry bar, and a sledgehammer), a group of six can muck a good sized house in about a day and a half, working from early to late. But the destruction is so widespread that it is hard to concentrate your efforts on one house.

A final note. Rod asked me if I had taken pictures and I told him that I had not. People are so raw and vulnerable, with their whole lives on their front lawns, that I did not feel right taking pictures of it. There is a kind of material nakedness that comes from exposing so much of your life on the street, so I’m afraid I have only words, which cannot do justice to what I’ve seen. And I’ve told the stories only because I want people to know how achingly bad it is here, how people are suffering, overwhelmed, and in need of help, and yet also hopeful and helpful.

I want to quote here a passage from the actor Wendell Pierce’s 2015 memoir The Wind In The Reeds, which it was my great privilege to collaborate with him on. Believe me, this is not another celebrity memoir. It is an amazing book, for reasons that have nothing to do with me, and everything to do with the extraordinary man Wendell is, and the extraordinary family from which he comes. It is a tale of faith, family, art, culture, and resilience in the face of immense obstacles. At its center is the response — his and his family’s — to Katrina, which destroyed his childhood home in New Orleans. Wendell relocated his elderly parents, Tee and Amos, to Baton Rouge after the storm. This passage concerns their first trip back to New Orleans’s Pontchartrain Park neighborhood to see the little brick house they had lived in since the 1950s. I include this here to give you an idea of what kind of emotional bombs are going off all over south Louisiana today, in the wake of last week’s flooding.

The only image I can compare post-apocalyptic Pontchartrain Park to is Hiroshima after the atomic bomb. The devastation was so complete, so definitive. We stopped at a Red Cross station on the perimeter before going in and got food, drink, and supplies, including hazmat suits, because the water that flooded the area had been so toxic. Making our way over to our beloved Debore Drive was like homecoming in Chernobyl. Everything—everything—was gray from caked-on mud left behind by six weeks of stagnant water. There was so much debris in the streets that we had to drive on sidewalks. The silence was absolute; not a soul was around. All the trees were destroyed; those left standing had been stripped of their leaves. This is what I imagine nuclear winter is like.

Months later, when I began rehearsing my role as Vladimir in the Classical Theater of Harlem’s production of Godot (which, in 2007, we would reprise in New Orleans), I didn’t have to work to place myself in the desolation imagined by Beckett. I had been there with my family. I had seen it, smelled it, felt its wrath, and absorbed its numbing lessons amid a silence that seemed eternal.

At last, we pulled up to our house. The grass was gone and mud was caked above the doors. But it was still standing. There were no cars. There were no people. If there was movement, even two blocks away, you could hear it. The stench of mold, chemicals, mud, sewage, stagnant water, and decay was overwhelming.

As silly as it sounds, we tried to open the front door with a key, which didn’t work. So Ron [Pierce, Wendell’s brother] and I broke down the door.

The inside was worse than our direst imaginings. Much worse. The interior looked as if a bomb made of mud and ink had gone off inside. All the furniture had been overturned and thrown into piles by the water. The refrigerator was on its side, and when we opened its door, the smell of rotten meat nearly knocked us down. Katrina had not merely sacked the house; she had defiled it.

My father started to cry. “This is where we raised our family, Black [Amos’s nickname for his wife, Tee]. And it’s all gone.”

My mother stood by silently and cried, too. We all did. Everything we had associated with that house, every object, was gone, either washed away by the flood, disintegrated by the toxic brew in which it had been steeping for weeks, or so fouled that it likely could never be recovered.

Standing on that filth-gilded street that had once, in my family’s imagination, had been paved with gold, I knew without the least doubt that I had lost everything that told me who I was. The spirit had gone out of house that had been the embodiment of our family’s life, leaving it a corpse putrefying under the relentless south Louisiana sun. It felt that the only thing any of us standing there had left was our lives, our memories, and each other. And then the sense came over me that if we didn’t regain at least some of what was stolen from us, we would lose our lives too. Given how old Daddy and Tee were, this was not an abstract threat. In that moment, with the old man’s sobbing the only sound in the sepulchral silence, I felt as if I was standing at my mother and father’s open grave. There was nothing keeping them from stepping forward into the void and letting the desecrated earth swallow them whole.

Standing in the driveway, a few feet from the filthy front door, Daddy broke down. “I don’t want to go back,” he declared. “It’s too much.”

But we had to go back. There was no way forward except to go back. The road to the Pierce family’s future, if we were to have a future, ran through Pontchartrain Park. If we didn’t take it, if we didn’t push on through the debris and the despair, we might as well die.

I thought of Aristile [Wendell’s slave ancestor], and what he had come through. I thought of Mamo and Papo [Wendell’s farmer grandparents], and what they achieved against odds that must have seemed impossible. I thought of Daddy and Tee, and all the older folk who raised me in Pontchartrain Park, and how the tenacity of their hope drove them forward. I thought about the experience of all Africans in the American Diaspora, how they—how we—had everything taken from us. We lost our ancestral homeland, we lost our gods, we lost our freedom, and often we even lost our families. We were poor and abused, beaten and lynched, told we were nothing, humiliated every day of our lives.

And yet we came through all these things. Not only did we survive them; we conquered them. Every Negro spiritual, every blues lament, every jazz composition is a song of victory. Every true poem, every real drama, and every authentic novel written by an African American is a proclamation of triumph. Every performance by an African-American actor, dancer, or musician that faithfully expresses our people’s journey and forges a bond of recognition and understanding among all peoples about humanity’s collective pilgrimage—each one is to defy death, to deflect its sting, and to deny it the last word.

That desolated house, which had cradled my brothers and me, was now a tomb. The neighborhood founded in one of the deepest valleys in the city of New Orleans, and that Tee and Daddy and their generation cultivated into a lush and fertile garden, was now a desert. The water had long since receded, but it had left behind nothing but dry bones.

Everything within me screamed: These bones must live!

And then a light appeared in the darkness. Staggering around the ruins in our hazmat suits and masks, like explorers on an alien world, Daddy found his wallet, which he had left behind in the rush to flee the storm. He opened it and found that everything in it had been destroyed—except for a single item. It was a photograph of my late brother Stacey. The borders had been eaten away by the poisoned water, but Stacey’s face looked upon us with perfect clarity. And he was smiling.

“Oh, my God!” said Daddy. “I’ve still got Stacey! I’ve still got my son!”

That was the sign we needed. Finding the image of his dead boy, the firstborn son whose memory he and my mother mourned every day, caused a new birth of hope in Daddy’s heart. If Stacey could come through the flood, so could he. So could we all.

We doubted our strength to go on, but we made our minds up to do it anyway, one step at a time. Daddy, Tee, Ron, and I decided to come back every single day and clean as much as we could manage, for as long as we could manage.

And so we did. It was an excruciating experience, like waking up every morning to go to your own wake. My father said we should just throw everything away, but Tee and I said no, we couldn’t afford to do that. We were going to bring every single relic we found inside the house outside, lay it in front of him and my mother, and let them decide what to hold on to and what to let go. If everything really is lost, I told him, you might lose any hope that you have a future.

I don’t get any money from sales of The Wind In The Reeds, so please understand that it is not self-serving for me to say that I wish everybody would read Wendell’s book, if only to understand what it’s like for an entire city full of folks to lose everything they have, especially their heirlooms, to a flood. More important, I wish every family in south Louisiana who is today mucking out their house had a copy of that book to read when they found time to rest. There is so much hope in Wendell’s story.

A final note: the house in Baton Rouge that Wendell moved Amos and Tee into took on water during the flood. Wendell is going to have to muck it out himself. Floods are no respecter of celebrity, or of anything, really.

UPDATE: Gutted houses, disemboweled lives:

People's lives and memories out on the curb on Teah in Central. Neighbor tells me no one here has flood insurance. pic.twitter.com/CqhfcmjMzm

— Hilary Scheinuk (@hscheinukphoto) August 18, 2016

UPDATE.2: My people. South Louisiana people:

#Louisiana #laflood pic.twitter.com/xEZQBpBHuk

— Foxy (@kaylayable) August 18, 2016

Obama’s Great Vacation Weather

Hey, wonder how the weather is on Martha’s Vineyard, where the president and his family are enjoying a swell vacation? Let’s check the Internet:

Wow, sounds fun! So, how are things for the people in Livingston Parish (those who are able to get back into their flooded homes, that is; 90% of the homes there took on water) tonight, without power and therefore without air conditioning?

President Coolidge came down in a railroad train

With a little fat man with a note-pad in his hand

The President say, “Little fat man, ain’t that a shame

What the river has done

To this poor cracker’s land.”

— Randy Newman, Louisiana 1927

Hey, at least President Coolidge came.

(Oh yes indeed, I am pissed off. I have liberal Democratic friends down here who are pissed off too.)

Where’s Obama? Hillary? Trump?

You might be tired of hearing it, but you’re gonna hear it from me again: we are dealing with a staggeringly large human tragedy here in south Louisiana. 

Let’s check in to see what our top political leaders are saying and doing about it, shall we? USA Today notices that neither campaign has said much of anything about the Louisiana catastrophe — this, five days after the flooding began. Here are some details from my searching.

Since Friday, when the flooding began, Hillary Clinton has said nothing publicly about the disaster. She has tweeted or retweeted 84 tweets (as of this writing). She has written exactly one addressing the situation in Louisiana:

Closely monitoring the flooding in Louisiana & Mississippi. The @RedCross is helping displaced families in need: https://t.co/sSYTbQMndP -H

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) August 16, 2016

Hillary devoted three times that number of tweets to congratulating US women athletes at the Rio games. Hey, I have no problem with celebrating their victories. But let’s see: over 100,000 people have lost their homes in Louisiana. More than half of them are women, it stands to reason. This is not a secret. If you want to win the attention of the Democratic nominee for president, it’s much better to be a woman athlete than a Louisiana woman made homeless by the flooding, it would appear.

By the way, she devoted seven tweets directly or indirectly to immigration. It wouldn’t be fair to say that immigrants matter to Hillary seven times more than her own countrymen who have lost everything in the floods, would it? Maybe not. But I will say that Mrs. Clinton has an interesting set of priorities.

Let’s check out Donald Trump’s statements in the same period of time. He’s said nothing to the media. On Twitter, where he is famously logorrheic, he has sent out 35 tweets since Friday. Number of tweets that mention the Louisiana disaster: zero. Number of tweets that gripe about media bias: ten.

Well, what about the President of the United States, which, last I checked, still included Louisiana? Since last Friday, Barack Obama’s office has put out 14 tweets in his name. What were they about:

Climate change: 2

Judge Merrick Garland: 5

DREAM Act (for immigrants): 1

Paid family leave: 1

Vehicle emission standards: 2

Gun violence: 3

Louisiana floods: 0

To his credit, the president has released disaster aid to Louisiana, and has sent the FEMA chief down. But he is not interrupting his vacation on fancy Martha’s Vineyard to come give comfort and show compassion to his own countrymen who are in extreme pain.

Despite George W. Bush’s folly on Katrina, which left a permanent mark on his legacy, Obama remains on vacation, just as Bush did. Here’s how things went down with Bush back in 2005, according to a 2015 retrospective in US News & World Report:

Americans across the country were shocked by the television images they saw in Katrina’s immediate aftermath. People stood on rooftops waving their arms and pleading for help as the flood waters inundated their communities. Desperate folks in the Superdome appeared in heartbreaking TV interviews begging for aid in their time of need. Making matters worse was that 67 percent of New Orleans was African American and 30 percent of the residents were poor, creating the impression that the government was insensitive and neglectful of minorities and the less fortunate.

While all this was going on, the president of the United States remained aloof from the disaster. Day after day, George W. Bush continued a long-planned vacation at his 1,600-acre Prairie Chapel Ranch in Crawford, Texas, and his staff didn’t want to burden him with detailed information about the situation on the Gulf Coast. When Katrina made landfall, Bush had been on holiday at his ranch for 27 days, according to a tabulation kept by CBS News.

As the hurricane grew into a catastrophe, and as the nation watched the TV coverage in horror, Bush’s aides decided they had to inform the president about it in stark terms. One of his aides put together a video showing scenes of hurricane-ravaged communities and showed it to the president. At this point, Bush decided he should cut his vacation short and return home two days early to preside over the federal response from Washington. He flew back to Washington on August 31, after 29 days at his ranch.

On the way back, he had Air Force One fly over part of the devastated area and he glimpsed the wreckage from the plane. White House officials allowed news photographers to take photos of a grim-faced Bush looking out an Air Force One window but the PR gambit backfired. Many Americans saw the photo, which was widely disseminated, as evidence that Bush was too distant from the misery below. In a 2010 interview with NBC, Bush conceded that allowing the photo to be taken was a “huge mistake” because it made him seem “detached and uncaring.”

Bush declined to visit the devastated area right away. White House aides said at the time that Bush didn’t want to cause disruptions in rescue and recovery efforts by diverting security and communications to himself. But Bush allies privately conceded that he could have quickly visited somewhere along the Gulf Coast with minimal disruption, perhaps a staging site, to show solidarity with victims of the hurricane and the first responders. His supporters said later that his slow reaction and the weak federal, state and local response to the hurricane undermined Bush’s reputation for being an effective crisis manager and a decisive leader. And his reputation never improved even though he later made repeated visits to the hurricane zone and steered billions of federal dollars into recovery programs.

“He never recovered from Katrina,” says a former Bush adviser and Republican strategist who wants to remain anonymous to avoid offending the Bush family. “The unfolding disaster with the Iraq war [a conflict which Bush ordered] didn’t help, but it’s clear that after Katrina he never got back the popularity that he had.” Referring to Bush’s decision to fly over the ravaged areas and allow photos to be taken of him peering out the window, the former adviser added: “He’s rued that decision ever since.”

Well, Obama can plausibly claim that the media haven’t been reporting on the 2016 Louisiana disaster like it did on Katrina, but really, is that any excuse? Does the President of the United States really depend on the national media to tell him when part of the nation he governs has been devastated in a rolling catastrophe? According to an August 16 Associated Press report, here’s what America’s president has been doing while Louisiana drowns:

President Barack Obama did something unusual during his summer vacation on Martha’s Vineyard: He went out on the town four nights in a row.

After a better part of a decade of using this breezy Massachusetts island as a low-key, quiet summer retreat, Obama has picked up the pace this year. In his final summer vacation as president, Obama has spent almost every night of his escape painting its towns red — so to speak.

The stunner came late Sunday when the president assembled his security and press entourage to go out at nearly 11 p.m. It was a move all but impossible to imagine happening in Washington, where Obama’s occasional social outings tend to begin much earlier.

And people in Washington wonder why so many Americans have lost faith in our political leaders and institutions. These contemptible people.

Louisianans are actual Americans, believe it or not (Via Facebook)

Calling Baton Rouge

It just keeps getting worse. The water is receding in the Baton Rouge area, but still rising in Acadiana. About an hour ago, the bottom fell out, and it rained like hell. Then the mobile phones went off with a flash flood warning. You wonder when it will stop.

A friend and reader of this blog was out in Denham Springs today, just east of BR, where 90 percent of the houses took on water. He said it was total devastation. It shook him up bad. I’ve asked him to write something about what he saw, for this blog. He’s going to try. Watch this space. He did say the thing people need more than anything else is help cleaning out their houses — tearing down drywall, etc. He said the elderly without family nearby are going to suffer the hardest, because they can’t do the work themselves, and have no one to do the work for them.

I don’t want to encourage people around the country to get in their cars and come here right now to help, because I don’t know if the city and its region is prepared for that just now. I could be wrong. But please, keep track of this story, and when you see reputable organizations putting out the word to volunteer, come if you can. So many of you did it for New Orleans after Katrina, and we love you for it. Now we in south Louisiana are going to have to ask you for help again. We are helping ourselves, God knows, but the task ahead is immense. An estimated 6.9 trillion gallons of water fell on us in two or three days. Nobody could cope with that alone.

I’ve been hearing from a few Baton Rouge area expats who have been deeply shocked and moved by what they have seen on TV and heard from kinfolks. Here’s a moving piece from The Mighty Favog, a blogger and Baton Rouge native who now lives in Omaha. Excerpts, with visuals in the original:

This is my neighborhood, the one in Baton Rouge where I grew up.

My parents built their first — and only — house there in 1956. I moved in at the end of March 1961 from my previous address at the old Our Lady of the Lake maternity ward.

From 1956 until three days ago, not a drop of unwanted water entered 10645 Darryl Drive unless somebody spilled a glass of it on the floor. Then we mopped it up.

Look at the picture above, taken by the Civil Air Patrol on Sunday. 10645 Darryl Drive is in the bottom fourth, one-third from the left.

There’s not a big enough mop in the world.

Favog expresses gratitude that his parents didn’t live to see this catastrophe. And he profanely expresses exactly what so many of us here feel about the way many in the national media has reported, or failed to report, what’s happened down here (that’s changing now). Normally I bowdlerize profanity quoted here, but it doesn’t seem quite right to do that now:

Louisiana lives matter . . . not that you could tell from watching the evening news or the cable networks, where all the airtime is devoted to more pressing things than the fate of rednecks, coonasses and black folks in a banana republic somewhere in Flyover Country.

Somewhere toward the bottom.

NO, the cable networks are preoccupied by what obviously matters in life, like panels of opposing party hacks yelling at one another over whether Donald Trump’s shit stinks. Tomorrow, Don Lemon and Anderson Cooper will be hosing down the bellowing political hacks as they debate whether Trump was right to be livid that CNN suggested that his shit wasn’t the best shit, the best smelling shit that anyone ever shit. Believe me.

As a former resident of 10645 Darryl Drive, I have an opinion about what these blathering, coastal media elites are full of.

Read the whole thing.

It’s raining as I write this, and thundering, and lightning, and Baton Rouge is under a flash flood warning again. I’m going to repost these words from Thomas Achord, the head of the rhetoric school at Sequitur Classical Academy in Baton Rouge. Thomas lives in Livingston Parish, and spent the past few days in his boat, rescuing people as part of the Cajun Navy. (Note to the classical school community nationwide: more than a few families in the Sequitur family really need your help. They’ve lost everything. Can you stand with them?) He wrote:

Louisiana is most beautiful when it is a great disaster. The entire society spontaneously comes together as if joined by familial ties. No one watches his neighbor suffer but all selflessly and voluntarily go about seeking whom they can help. And they do so with their own personal means – trucks, boats, rafts, chainsaws, shovels, food, and often at risk of their lives. We work hard and we eat grand, we are filthy but laughing, we lose our homes yet are welcomed into others. I have seen finer lands but not people. Keep the world and give me Louisiana, even in disaster.

That’ll lift your spirits. And this. And, if you’re from here, or ever lived here, so will this video below, which was made by a Baton Rouge advertising agency. I just received it from Cate, who I met volunteering with her on the serving line at the Celtic Media shelter last weekend. Watch it, and pass it on to everyone you know who loves the LSU Tigers, south Louisiana, and Baton Rouge. It focuses on this city, but let this city be a stand-in for the huge area surrounding it, and Acadiana too. #LouisianaStrong