Who Will Take Out the Garbage: A Report from New Orleans

A special thanks today to the Rainbow Grocery Collective of San Francisco
for their generous donation to the Common Ground Relief Effort!

Who Will Take Out the Garbage: A Report from New Orleans

By Starhawk

It¹s like a scene out of a post-apocalyptic movie‹a crowd of people gathered
in the street outside the local tavern in the Bywater district of the Ninth
Ward. The lower Ninth Ward, a few blocks away, is the scene of the worst
destruction, but this eclectic neighborhood, one of the centers of
alternative culture in New Orleans, has fortunately escaped heavy damage.
Still, roofs are off, houses are molding away from the inside, and the
streets are piled with garbage that, six weeks after the hurricane, has not
been picked up.


The people gathered are black, white, gay, straight, a motley mix of artists
and old-time Cajuns and circus performers, all talking madly and hugging
each other and drinking beer. Malik, a founder of the Common Ground
Collective, calls them to order. He makes me think of an old lion, with his
mane of dreadlocks, turning his big head slowly from side to side, surveying
an unruly pride. He outlines the work Common Ground has done in Algiers,
tells them that if they can organize themselves, Common Ground can provide
supplies and volunteers. Everyone is talking at once and interrupting each
other, but there¹s a lively, charged energy.



³What do you need here?² Malik asks.

³Garbage,² people thunder back. There¹s a chaotic but unanimous agreement
that garbage pickup is their first priority, and several people begin
simultaneously to outline their failed attempts to get the city to do
something.



Malik stops them. ³If the city won¹t do it, you got to do like we did across
the river, and do it yourself. Now, who wants to do that? Who will
volunteer?²



Most of the people raise their hands.



³When do you want to begin?²



³Now!²



We meet the next morning in Washington Square Park, where a kitchen from the
Rainbow Family is providing the best free food in town, far, far better than
the Styrofoam-packed chili dogs or military ration MREs (Meals Ready to Eat)
available from the official relief organizations. Over eggs and pancakes,
we get organized.



Who will take out the garbage? It¹s the question always posed to any vision
of utopia. Who will do the dirty work?



We will. Come on, it¹ll be fun, you¹ll enjoy it. And if we just start doing
what needs to be done, others will join us and the work will go fast and
pleasantly.



About fifteen of us head out, a mix of Common Ground volunteers and far
fewer of the local community than raised their hands the night before We
start at the corner by the bar where we met the night before, and begin
picking up sacks of trash, plastic bags full of rotting food waste, and all
the debris ejected from people¹s flooded homes and shops. The small corner
store has half its roof off and its contents on the street. We sling the
bags into the back of pickup trucks, and pile it all on the meridian divider
of a main street nearby, where the city can¹t easily overlook it. We
separate brush from mixed garbage, and stack anything usable separately.
It¹s hard work, and dirty, physical and sweaty and fun, like going to the
gym, but more fun really because we¹re working together. And satisfying as
only cleaning up a really, really dirty mess can satisfy.



Tomorrow we will try to get a flat-bed trailor and pick up refrigerators.
Almost every house on the block‹in the entire area, has a dead refrigerator,
some taped shut. People are warned not to open them inside the house, that
you can¹t get rid of the smell. You can clean them time and again with
bleach, leave them baking in the sun for days‹and still days later the smell
will remain and bugs will be pouring out of the innards. The phenomenal
waste of the embodied energy in all these appliances is appalling, but I
can¹t think of any real good use for them myself except possibly to fill
them with cob, cement them shut and stack them for natural building blocks.
A refrigerator-block wall‹good insulation, poor thermal mass, and really
hard to get anything else to attach solidly. And the bugs would still be a
problem. But these are the sorts of things the mind ponders while picking
up trash.



Meanwhile Juniper makes a valiant attempt to alert the city agencies that
the trash will need to be picked up. She is told to call 211, for Emergency
Services. Emergency Services tells her that the Southern Baptist Convention
is responsible for solid waste disposal. Huh?? Even in Bush¹s new
faith-based world, we can¹t quite believe this. She tries the local waste
management company‹they say that the mayor has replaced them the week before
with the Army Corps of Engineers. Juniper eventually gets through to some
puzzled woman at a phone service in Tennessee from the Corps who has no idea
what she¹s talking about. After an hour and twenty-five phone calls, she¹s
back to 211 and the Baptists. Now, the Baptists are a fine religious
organization but we had no idea they were experts in solid waste management.
Maybe it¹s the immersion thing‹some deep religious connection to
cleanliness? Accept Jesus into your heart, and He will rapture your dead
refrigerator into some other dimension? If every Baptist in the south were
to suddenly appear in New Orleans and pick up even one sack of garbage, we
could get the place clean in a day, but really, a few Bobcats and some big
garbage trucks would actually be more to the point. Couldn¹t we just go
back to the Mafia? Or, what a radical idea, what if everyone in the city
and the country regularly tithed some of their income to provide the
services everyone needs, so we could pool our money and afford things like
bulldozers and regular trash pickup that actually got around to all the
neighborhoods where people lived? We used to have such a thing‹it was called
Œgovernment¹ before Bush and his cronies on the far right began to
systematically starve it and convince people that it was better to depend on
religious charity to solve all their problems.



But the Baptists are not all that well schooled in solid waste
management‹we¹re not sure they even know that the City of New Orleans is
expecting them to pick up trash in the Ninth Ward. In any case, they are
not in evidence here. Instead, it¹s a group of neighborhood folks and a few
volunteers I know for a fact are Pagans, anarchists, atheists and other
undesirables, who have just started doing it.



Across the street, a battered white house sports a big American flag. The
man inside, a big Cajun guy in a baseball cap, comes over and offers us
water. He¹s an ex-marine who used to train the Contras in Honduras to
attack the Sandinistas, I¹m told, until he became sickened by what was going
on. He¹s delighted we¹re cleaning up the neighborhood, tells us stories of
the hurricane, how after it was over the neighbors all got together and had
a big barbecue with the meat that would otherwise rot in their freezers. He
tells us how he worried about the older black folks across the street who
had diabetes, tried to get them fruit and keep them fed.



³I don¹t understand racism,² he says. ³I¹ve got six kind of blood in my
veins. My people been here for generations, five thousand years. I¹m part
Chittimacha Indian. The reason I look white‹my mother married a German, but
my great-grandaddy was a six foot African man.²



He was one of the snipers, who sat on his roof with his rifle to shoot
suspected looters. The area is full of signs that say, ³We are home, you are
being watched!² ³Mean dogs inside.² ³This area protected by Smith and
Wesson.²

He put up his flag as soon as the wind stops‹but he hates the government.
To him, that flag means the American people.



³This is so great,² he says as he brings us over cold water and hand
sanitizer. ³And that it¹s people doing it, not the government.²



At the end of the day we go over to BJ¹s, the neighborhood bar where
everyone hangs out. ³This is our living room,² one woman tells me. They are
newly back‹today is the first day many people have come home, and it is so
beautiful to see how happy everyone is to be back. They are running up to
each other and hugging their neighbors, laughing and crying. One of them
buys beers for everybody on the cleanup crew‹we have forty offered to us
within half an hour, more than we can drink.



It¹s what¹s so wonderful about New Orleans, and so different from most
cities in this country‹these tight-knit communities, where neighbors know
each other and care about each other and have place where people go and meet
and hang out together, Cajuns and radicals and artists and circus
performers, newcomers and old timers all.



³Click your heels together three times‹we¹re home!² says another big guy in
a baseball cap, beaming. They all hug us and thank us. They¹re dealing
with the damage in their own homes, trying to clean up and clear out and
make them liveable before they get back to work‹if they still have jobs.



³But will people come back, do you think?² I ask a blond woman who is trying
to get me inside to play pool.



³They¹ll be back,² she assures me. ³You won¹t be able to keep them away.
We have a neighborhood blog, and we¹ve kept in contact, and everything all
over it is all, ³when can we go home?¹ ŒWhen will they let us back?¹ ŒWe
want to go home!¹



Then Juniper and Lisa and I head out. We decide to drive through the lower
Ninth Ward. Today is the first day that people are being let back in, to all
but the very worst-hit neighborhoods. But we talk our way through the
checkpoints, and drive through the blasted streets where the levee broke and
the homes were assaulted by a mini-tsunami, a twelve-foot high wall of
water. It¹s a scene of unbelievable devastation. Streets reduced to piles
of rubble, houses that are nothing but a roof in a sea of mud. One house
has floated off its foundation and rests atop a car. A truck has careened
into the side of a house, its front end resting on the lintel of a second
story window. Other houses are simply piles of wood and scattered shingles.



There is no going back here, no happy homecoming for this neighborhood. No
bomber, no invading army, could level it more thoroughly. It is Iraq
brought home, literally, because the agent of destruction here was not the
hurricane, but human neglect and warped priorities. The money that should
have maintained the levees, like the National Guard that could have
contained the looters, went to Iraq. Homeland Security, brought to you by
Bush and neocons. Do you feel safer, now?

We walk briefly on the street closest to the break in the levee, a sea of
churned mud. A room is ripped open, the whole house destroyed, but inside,
a chandelier hangs intact. I¹m thinking of a story I read somewhere, about
a poor Southern family, where the mother¹s deepest desire, her symbol of
everything that meant comfort and safety and beauty and a good life, was a
chandelier. In the story, they finally got one, and then some catastrophe
struck, I don¹t remember what. But this chandelier, intact among the ruins,
seems to symbolize that some hopes and dreams can survive even this
devastation. They might not be my hopes, or my dreams, or my vision of what
is beautiful, but they are someone¹s.


And that¹s my own particular faith‹that if we support each others¹ dreams,
if we deal with the garbage, if we take care of each other and do what needs
to be done, some beauty will be born out of all of this mess. Click your
heels together. There¹s no place like home.

Starhawk

http://www.starhawk.org <http://www.starhawk.org/>



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Starhawk is an activist, organizer, and author of The Earth Path, Webs of
Power: Notes from the Global Uprisin, The Fifth SacredThing and other books
on feminism, politics and earth-based spirituality. She teaches Earth
Activist Trainings that combine permaculture design and activist skills,
http://www.earthactivisttraining.org <http://www.earthactivisttraining.org/> and
works with the RANT trainer¹s collective, http://www.rantcollective.net
<http://www.rantcollective.net/> that offers training and support for
mobilizations around global justice and peace issues.

Hundreds of groups are collecting money to aid hurricane victims. If you
want to help the efforts of these grassroots groups, you can donate directly
to Common Ground at their website:

http://www.commongroundrelief.org <http://www.commongroundrelief.org/>

http://www.pagancluster.org <http://www.pagancluster.org/>

Tax deductible donations can also be sent to:

ACT
1405 Hillmount St.
Austin, Texas
78704
U.S.A.

Come join us! If you have skills to offer, particularly medical training,
building skills, child care experience, counseling, or just a general
willingness to clean up garbage and do what needs to be done, there is lots
of work to do. Volunteers will be needed for months to come, as relief turns
to rebuilding. You can come for a short time or the long term.

For more information:
An e-mail to katrina [at] pagancluster.org will get a response as soon as
possible.

There is also useful and updated information at the following web-sites:

http://www.commongroundrelief.org/

http://www.pagancluster.org/
http://www.vfproadtrips.org/