NEW ORLEANS#3
Schweickhardt's   
New Orleans, LA   

If I'd have known

If I'd have known it would be the last time I ever saw the city as I knew it, I would've taken a lot more, and more varied, pictures. I would've stayed longer, slept less, and documented the entire bus/train station WPA mural, not just the klansman and the farmer spraying holy pesticide on the evil boweevel. I would've gone back to the Lion's Den every night until the hurricane, if I could, to sing along with great r&b records with the coolest people I've ever had the pleasure of drinking with. As it is, I even found myself thinking "well....new orleans is looking for a new police force-wonder if they'd take me?" Since I don't really want to be a cop, I'm now thinking of working mardi gras, waiting tables (my real job,) just so I can feel that air on my skin again, and maybe say "I'm soooo fucking sorry!" to everyone I meet who lives there still. Maybe what I need to do is go to the ends of the US and apologize to the displaced instead.
I read that a Syrian man, who stayed in the city after evacuation to protect his properties, but wound up helping his neighbors, dogs left behind, and anyone who needed it, was arrested and held in a chicken wire cage in the bus station-in the name of homeland security. He had a green card, but it didn't matter. Our government was doing nothing, but this man was stopped from doing anything he could for anyone who needed it, because he was Syrian. and all that's another thing altogether, not really about new orleans, but of course about tragedy, which is all about the US today.

Gwen Carter