On Being Home in America....saving our soul

Two years ago today…

(photo scout: New Orleans 8/2007)

When I boarded the plane for the flight home yesterday I was bone tired. Disillusioned. Stuck. This had been the hardest trip for me personally. I knew music was a possible answer for what ailed my soul and so as I settled in for the flight, I begrudgingly placed on my Ipod and put it at random. The first songs were Loud and I shuffled through until I hit a soft piano opening. Better. I then realized it was the song “Feels Like Home” by Bonnie Raitt and the tears welled up in my eyes. …

(photo scout: lower 9th ward 8/2007)

Feels like home to me
Feels like I’m all the way back where I belong

Have you ever just wanted so badly to get Home? To have your feet land where you come from? To be in the old familiar place you love and know? A place where your roots lie and nourished you to whatever you’ve become? Man I wanted to be Home. And I was going home.

And I thought of the tens of thousands who cannot say the same. Stuck in Houston or Atlanta or the North Shore longing for the Lower Ninth or Gentilly or Da Parish. I was enroute to a clean shining functioning city where all my people were waiting. Waiting and enduring their small problems. I thought of those in the Marigny or Broadmoor or the Bywater longing for the return of their home city and the relief of having all their people home and blessed with small problems once again. In a few hours I would be home. Two years later they are still far far from there.

(photo scout: Lakeview 8/2007)

walk me through this one
don't leave me alone
calling all angels

At 36000 feet, in between my people, I heard the next soft opening calling upon the saints and angels for those who are tryin' hopin' hurtin' lovin' cryin' callin' 'cause they're not sure how this goes.' In  mere hours I’ll know exactly how it goes and I know in New Orleans they wait for that. They’ve waited 2 long years. How did it come to this in my greater home of America? Who are we…what have we become when a treasured city lies in so much ruin…its people abandoned most days, save those that now come around the 29th of August?

I realized as I have for each day of 24 months that I don’t have that answer. I’ve puzzled at it, teased it, tried to write that unifying theory of how this could happen…here…in America…. and I hear the refrain of ….if you could only crack the code then you'd finally understand what this all means.

I don’t know what it all means.....

(photo scout: Lakeview 8/2007)

….can music save your mortal soul?

I shuffled on to the next soft opening….American Pie. I heard the lyric as "muddled soul"  though I know Don sang "mortal soul." It takes me back to something I know. Something I felt and knew and thus wrote about some time ago….

If We lose New Orleans, We lose our soul.

And its not because it is a city so unique in culture and heritage or historic significance or economic importance or whatever reason put forth in hope that We Will Not Forget.

It is about more than New Orleans. It is about Us. It is about who we are as Americans. It is about the idealistic dream we share that is at the core of America, that we are all one people and equal. We band together, pull together, live together in common cause. It is an ideal tried, tested and battered through hundreds of years of events. It has run smack up against the cynics and the cynicism in each of us now. But still in the darkest times and mundane moments it will shock us with its call to us. That even as we war amongst ourselves as we are wont to do in our imperfect pursuit of the ideal, that we will as Lincoln once said we would “yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

Our better angels are calling.

We know it is wrong to abandon fellow Americans. We know it with what is the last held fiber that is America. And in these times it does indeed feel that we clutch that last fiber.

Looking down from that plane...looking at Our Land.....I vowed I will not let an unjust and illegitimate ruler steal that last held fiber from my grasp. I may be mocked and laughed at for such idealism but in the end it is that which I cherish most as an American. To be an idealist.  I unabashedly embrace it before you with my words. I hold and feel our soul in my hands and in my heart. It is a heavy heart though knowing that without deeds, Our deeds, what I hold...no, what WE hold...will be lost. Our action is past required. We no longer afford the luxury of time. This can not wait until 2009.

Arguments abound to save New Orleans for New Orleans sake. It is all well and good, right and just. I offer this. Of necessity, our necessity, we must save New Orleans for America’s sake. Our sake. This I know because I am an American.

And this is not America…

(Lakeview 8/2007)

This is America…..

(Lakeview 8/2007)

(lower 9th ward 8/2007)

And I Am Home.

Comments

[liberalrob]

This is not America (Youtube)

Not as good as the soundtrack version, but live versions rarely are.

A little piece of you
The little peace in me
Will die [This is not a miracle]
For this is not America

[dancinfool]

Scout,

I will be forever grateful that you took my birth city to your heart. Thanks.

[lb0313]

That is just a fabulous post, sweetie....

Come back soon!

[Harry]

Thanks for this. We all hoped that visits to New Orleans over time would identify progress, instead of highlighting how spotty (at best) it truly is.

Edwards' mention of a surge for Katrina vs. the surge in Iraq is very appropriate, but the parallels are sadly large. If you had been on a dog-and-pony bus ride (airport to Quarter and back again) I'm sure you could say "the surge" is working!
Again, thanks for witnessing the sad but true reality.

[BuggyQ]

Dang. I'd managed not to get weepy all day, and then I read this. But at least now I'm weepy in a "there's hope for humanity as long as there are people like scout" kinda way.

Thanks.

[Athenae]

God, I love you.

And the thing is, our better angels are always calling us. But we have all this crap we put out there so we don't have to listen. We have all these rooms we fill with stuff, and the things our fears are made of and the equally imaginary things we create to keep those fears away. Just so we don't have to listen. We always know what the right thing to do is. It's just a question of how good we are, by the time the right thing comes along, at lying to ourselves, and stuffing our ears with cotton, and humming to drown out the noise of the thing banging on the door saying, "I'm here, fucking pay attention now."

You're brilliant, you know.

A.

[lb0313]

And listen to A.

[Hoppy]

There is no way to read that without feeling deeply embarrassed and ashamed to be Americans. I keep wondering which is worse - thinking that this could only happen to a Democratic voting city like New Orleans, or thinking that it will happen to whatever city gets it next.

And, it isn't just little Georgie who is to blame either. I don't hear any outcry from the rest of us to force Congress to act. Why is that?

[scout]

Good question hoppy

[Kimberly]

Thank you for voicing again the feeling that has haunted me since it became apparent that Americans were not going to insist - no, DEMAND - that the government step up to the job of rebuilding the city of New Orleans and its levee system. This is not the America I grew up believing in.

[Sinfonian]

Thank you, scout. For this post, for all that you do, for being one of those voices in the wilderness reminding all of us that while we still have a lifetime's worth of work to do, there's still hope. There always is hope.

I was proud to join you in the First Draft Krewe last spring. I made lifelong friends there, some of whom I'll be seeing again in D.C. on Sept. 15. But I want to make another trip to New Orleans. I need to go back. And while life intrudes and my schedule this fall probably won't permit a trip, I'll be there as soon after the New Year as I can. Maybe as part of the Krewe again? ;)

Re: "Feels Like Home." I don't know if it's the same song, but "Feels Like Home" is on my .mp3 player as well -- but sung by Chantal Kreviazuk. It's an exceptionally emotional song for me because of its relationship to a love I had, and lost. It was "her song." Now, it will be New Orleans' song, too ...

Thank you again. You inspire me.

[scout]

Sinfonian I'd love to go back some time with ya. I know Feels like Home is a love song but it hit me as it did in that way about place rather than person.

Kimberly--I'm with ya.
A. and lb--thank you--as well as everyone's kind thoughts