...into this...?
Or with the times that I learned to drywall:
...and what a subfloor looks like:
...and how and why to end it all:
I learned the difference between drywall drills and impact drivers, between legitimate contractors and exploitative frauds, between compassionate government and laissez-faire excusism, between disposable cities (myth) and indispensable cultural centers (reality),
between theoretical idealism and you-provide-the-materials-we'll-provide-the-labor world-changing effort. I learned about the ubiquity of good people and new friends, and the truth of Margaret Mead's most famous admonishment. I learned that jazz lives most fully in the streets.
And for all that a nice suit and a cubicle to work from lend forward momentum to movements, I learned that there's nothing like grueling work on the front lines to ease your soul and make measurable change in the world. Viva volunteerism.
So I'm back now, reflective and sun-tanned, and I cannot recommend too strongly that you volunteer yourself with lowernine.org. To my friends in the foundations of the rebuilding effort: thank you, and best of luck. I'll see you again soon.
2 comments:
If we looked at all the "disposable cities" that we have in this country, over 85% of the population would have to be displaced. While no one will argue against the skepticism of the placement of such a city given the environmental instability of the area, I can only come to two simple conclusions of why New Orleans could be considered disposable:
1. over 33% of the city is black
2. capitalism no longer sees the city as profitable to the "treadmill of production" (Schnaiberg)
This is about race and class. The nation poured every ounce of sympathy and recovery dollars into rebuilding the world trade center and the lives of those lost, but that was Manhattan. This is a place where worth is not measured by capital, but by culture. Bourdieu's idea of cultural capital, although poorly worded in the context of capitalism, tells us that there are better measures to analyze the importance of an area and it's people.
While you've read my skepticism about rebuilding, here is my real standpoint.
That's my primary criticism of most economic thought, and the reason why I abandoned it as a major: the twinned tendencies to reduce all value to dollars, and to assume that all dollar value includes all value.
So I think we're largely in agreement. My only quibble would be to say that most of the actions and ideas we identify as 'racist' are really 'classist' -- and that, as a matter of generalization, it's more useful and more accurate to think of social biases in terms of that classism.
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