I'm growing weary of carpetbaggers...

Ray had a very thought-provoking post on the guilt he's feeling about "missing" the storm. I understand this totally. In my travels this past year (I spent over 30 weeks this year out of town on Monday thru Friday, teaching computer classes), I encountered a number of expatriated New Orleanians who really were upset that they weren't "home" to help out.

This is something that, like the WWII soldiers Ray mentions, individuals have to work out for themselves. I don't think any real New Orleanian would think less of someone who survived the storm, or who returned to the city afterwards and now work to make this a better place.

It's the carpetbaggers that think their opinions have more worth than the survivors and the displaced that I have problems with

For example, take Andrei Codrescu, writer, poet, and teacher at LSU. While I was gutting my house in September of 2005, I had to listen to this arrogant prick broadcast on NPR from somewhere in Arkansas, telling people how New Orleans was "dead." Well, fuck you and the horse you rode in on, Professor. Just because you had nothing vested in New Orleans to the point where you could up and leave and stay away for an extended period of time doesn't mean the place is dead. While you were burying the city, a lot of us were working to fix the place so that your sorry ass could come back.

Now we've got bloggers from other parts of the country who haven't been to the city for years before the storm (if they've ever been here), telling us how we should proceed with respect to rebuilding. While I support anyone's right to their opinion, you'll forgive me if I choose to value some of those opinions about as much as I do an old book of coupons from K&B. If NYC, Philly, or DC were some sort of models for the way public housing should be done, and the working poor were treated with compassion and respect in those cities, I might feel like these bloggers and activists were entitled to some sort of moral superiority. New Orleans is not a blank drawing board for experiments in urban planning. My house is a better analogy, where the framework is still there, even though we had to cut out the walls. The walls and floors have to go back in, but most of the existing framework has to remain. It's all too easy to sit back in another city and say what you like and don't like about New Orleans and its residents. When you get off your ass and house-sit someone's property in a FEMA trailer to make sure their home doesn't get demolished prematurely, come talk to me. Until then, you'll pardon me if I don't find a lot of value in your moral outrage.

Then there's this from Ray's post:

I have another high school friend who is Nth generation Y'at, born on Mardi Gras Day in the back seat of a taxi stuck in parade crowds, and she has told me that amongst her writer friends, that division was not implicit, it was explicit. Writers who had lived here only a few years treated her as a tourist because during the storm she was teaching at a university in another state. "Sorry, honey, but you weren't here for it, so you don't really know." I know it hurts her quite a bit.

I'm glad I don't hang out with this type of carpetbagger. I have little patience for someone who's spent a few years eating occasionally at Domilise's and going to Rock N Bowl telling someone whose life essentially drowned in the Federal Flood that they "don't really know." I don't care if a 1982 graduate of Redeemer High School hand't been back to the city until last year, all it would take is one look at what eleven feet of water did to the place where they spent their adolescence, and the pain is going to be there. Unless the person we're talking about lived a very insular life Uptown (and Ray's description of her being an "Nth generation Y'at" indicates that's not the case), EVERY local lost something. These posers will go back to their high school reunions and hang out with people who have never experienced the loss of their town like New Orleanians have.

They can all kiss my pale white ass.