Post Mardi Gras reflection (not Lent-related)

Growing up in SC, I always considered Mardi Gras to be an exotic holiday – a day of absolute indulgence.  College buddies who road-tripped to New Orleans to celebrate this floating holiday had a cachet that nobody else could match.  To have taken days off from school on an unsanctioned holiday, attending the ultimate festival of pure decadence in the US – that was the mark of a serious hedonist.

When I arrived in New Orleans as a budding anthropologist in the late 90s, I decided that my best approach to this festival was an analytical one.  I would observe the rituals associated with Mardi Gras, allowing myself to enjoy it while maintaining a safe distance from the frenzy.

I looked at the ritual in terms of the symbolic redistribution of wealth between the elites elevated on the floats and the commoners below.  I considered the rites of passage necessary to gain entry into secretive organizations.  I observed the psychological changes involved in the masking behavior.  I wanted very much to experience the music that was so pervasive in the city, and to mark how it united the culture groups that lived here: the high school bands that take great pride in both sound and display. 

So I joined the crowd as a participant observer, with all of my observation skills engaged….

…and emerged, three hours later, wild-eyed, bead-festooned, ears ringing, reeling from the experience.  I had bloody, scraped elbows where I had ‘defended my position’ (did I really just elbow a little old lady in the face for some 22-cent beads?) and bloody, scraped knuckles

Jazzy

This week, I got to watch my grandkids playing jazz for the first time at Tipitina's amazing Sunday Youth Music Workshop.  They are both hard-working musicians, practicing their craft, getting beats and fingerwork and crossovers and flams and frets and hemiquavers...

...those two, like every musician I have ever met, speak a different language when they are talking music. 

So these competent budding musicians, who I have been admiring  am terribly envious of, got on stage and played with the house band.  The chord progression was simple, and was repeated over and over.  The drum line was not terribly intricate, and the house drummer walked them - all seven aspiring drummers - through the line a few times, and helped adjust them when they were not driving hard enough. 

Gabi and Remi in the all-new G&R.

But this was not learning and practicing a song.  This is not discovering how to play in sync with one another. 

Banj-handling

We have panhandlers on Carrolton Avenue in New Orleans.  It is the source of contention for a lot of us, and it makes us mad, because it is the same group, panhandling every day.  I have written before about homelessness and panhandling and about how I am conflicted by it.

But I think I may have happened upon a solution.

I was driving down Carrolton yesterday, and saw something that made me reach wildly, and mostly unsuccessfully, for my camera.  The picture I took was a blurry shot taken out the back window, and it is not even anything that is terribly out of the ordinary here in New Orleans. It was a guy with a tuba (OK, it was a Sousaphone), and he wasn't playing it, just walking down the street.

Turkeys and extractive economy in Louisiana

In the mid-1980s, a social program was introduced in Yucatan, and it was one of the more brilliant programs I have ever encountered. The government gave out turkey chicks to people in villages.

Strange thing to give, right? Free program. Just take the chicks, and raise them. No strings attached. But we will be back in a year, and will offer to buy the turkeys back.

The turkeys thrived in the village setting. The villagers got some money for minimal upkeep (the turkeys usually took up residence in a chicken coop that was already being used, and ate scraps and insects along the margin of the property) and the government got turkeys for redistribution. At a time when many young villagers were flocking (sorry) to the cities, following jobs, it provided one easy source of cash for villagers, and an additional source of protein for lean times.

Image from www.yucatanliving.com

To me, that seems to be the way an extractive economy should work. Yes, there should be profits that go to the group enacting the program. And yes, the guys providing the turkey chicks should make money - whether it is a government, or a non-profit - there should be a way to turn one turkey into a bunch more.

But the people who provide turkey with room and board get something, too. After all, when the turkey is gone, they are left to clean up the poop.

So it is with the Gulf of Mexico.

The people of the Gulf of Mexico have put up with the poop of turkeys for decades. In 1901, a well in Jennings, Louisiana first produced oil within the state. Since then, the oil industry has provided jobs for the people of Louisiana, oil companies made a profit and sent the final product across the nation, but it was the local environment has paid the price. Canals cut through healthy marsh to access wells, leading to saltwater intrusion and the death of the marsh. Oil leaks occurred, small and large. The fat turkeys grown here are sent out of state for the benefit of the nation (as well as for the benefit of the stockholders).


Progressive erosion in Coastal Louisiana, 1958, 1996.

But in this case, the villagers are not being paid for cleaning up turkey poop.

Essentially, in some ways, Louisiana is being treated as an American colony with an extractive economy. (And typical of such colonies, corruption seems to go hand in hand with the tie between the imperials and the colonial governance).

Oil companies are not the only responsible agents for the marsh that is disappearing at an alarming rate. If they were, the solutions would be easy. Unfortunately, there are a number of forces at play. 

The levees that prevent the Mississippi River from overflowing its banks and flooding resident also prevents the Mississippi River from overflowing its banks and nourishing the marshes. Managing the flow of the Mississippi River upstream starves the downstream area of sediment that would rebuild marshes. Storms tear through wetlands and tear them up, and have been doing more tearing since we have started seeing climate change. Nutria are unchecked destroyers of wetlands. Sea level rise and subsidence are brutal influences on marshes and swamps in coastal Louisiana. Added to all of these pressures, the canals carved into the marshes by the oil companies introduce saltwater into fresh marshes and essentially poison the plants.

I don’t believe that Louisiana has not benefitted from the relationship[i]. Concessions are always being made to avoid losing jobs and tax revenue for the state, so clearly the state has a vested interest in the investments made by the oil companies. And we, like all other states, benefit from the reduced cost of petroleum products. But the investment of 113 years of oil extraction has not resulted in huge strides towards development, while the impact from that investment has been increased at every step along the way.

It might be an exaggeration to say that Louisiana has not received any revenue from the offshore oil drilling, as Mary Landrieu famously claimed after the BP spill, but the state has certainly received very little (see an interesting breakdown here). Landrieu used the BP disaster as an opportunity to push for revenue sharing, a successful effort which will begin to show up in our state coffers in 2017.  We’ll see if the additional income can be used to reverse the impacts.

It would be an interesting comparison to take the income from the seafood industry and the oil industry and compare the two. Louisiana supplies 35% of the shrimp and oyster consumed by the US. We have a $220M sport hunting industry. Coastal fisheries in Louisiana make up 30% of the national total.

I suspect that a far greater proportion of the income from those industries stays in Louisiana than from the oil industry.

Turkeys.

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[i] Davis (1995) found that extractive economies as a whole have higher levels of development than economies without a substantial extractive sector. “Learning to love the Dutch disease: evidence from the mineral economies.” World Development 23(10):1765–1779.

Homeless and panhandling

"She will most likely just spend it on booze."

I run the gauntlet several times a week.  The drive between Riverbend and I-10 on Carrolton provides an opportunity for me to clear out all of the change I hoard for paying for parking or the extra dollar in my wallet I keep for the mid-afternoon Snicker's craving.  If I make it through the gauntlet with all of the lights green, I get my candy bar AND I have some change for the meter.  Otherwise:

The Carrolton and Claiborn intersection:  There is a guy there who is on crutches.  He has a sign that says "ANY AMOUNT HELPS.  GOD BLESS!"

The next intersection is Earhart Blvd.  This is where the kids dart in and out of traffic, each with a bucket.  They are dressed in their uniforms (basketball, cheerleading, whatever) and are raising funds to support the team.  At least, I think that is what they are doing.  Most of the time, but not always, you can see an adult supervising the collection plate as it is being passed.

The next big intersection is in front of Costco, where there are entrances coming from five different directions, and each is manned by an interchangeable homeless person with an identical handwritten sign. 

A couple of intersections later, I go past the latinos hanging out at what used to be the Home Depot.  Waiting for someone who needs help with carpentry or painting or weeding or whatever.

Do I give money?  Is it a bad idea?  Do I make eye contact and try to communicate love without giving?  Do I pretend I can't see them (check that cell phone for a message....)?  Would Jesus pull out his whip and turn over some tables, or would he invite himself home with them for dinner? 

A class I am part of discussed this yesterday, and I am fascinated by how passionate we are about a world we don't understand.  The fact that we are so uncomfortable means that it is something we should try harder to understand.

I have a friend who gets fighting mad about the issue every time it is discussed.  "If I were out begging, in the 95+ degree heat, without water or shade, in clothes that haven't seen a washer in weeks or months, with teeth that haven't seen a toothbrush and a crappy cardboard sign I had to steal from a dumpster, and I managed to scrape together enough to spend the night in the shelter and buy some food and maybe some medicine (you know, for the migraine I have from being dehydrated in the heat every day; or maybe for that UTI I have from not being able to keep up proper hygiene), I'd take that leftover $2.50 and buy myself a damn tall boy, too. In fact, that's what I do nearly every day. Reward my hard work with a beer. You think it's easy to beg for a living? You think that's not hard ass work with no reward and endless agony and a sinking sense of permanent hopelessness?"

CS Lewis had a similar (but much more quotable) response when asked about why he was giving money to a beggar.  "He will just use the money to buy ale!" his friend exclaimed.

"Well, that was all I was going to do with the money, too."

Our reaction to panhandling seems to be tied with a sense of accountability - the money should be used only in a manner in which we believe that is constructive, lading to a sense of improvement.  Which is right, on one level. Charitable giving without accountability leads to abuse. 

But as a Christian, I am given pretty direct instructions on how to behave, and it doesn't come with the disclaimers that I would like.  He just said, "Give to him who asks of you, and do not turn away from him who wants to borrow from you."

Wait, what? 

Obviously, JC didn't seem to understand about abuse of charity, or modern panhandling.  Or drug use.  Or poverty.  Or the concept of a 'hand up, not a hand out'.  Or any of the clever pithy sayings we come up with.  For him, the approach was simple.  Ask, receive.  Be asked, give.

So I guess I just drop the judgement.  Drop the condescension.  Drop the paternalism of 'I know better than you how you should be helped.'  And just give with a cheerful heart. I have a job, I have resources, and I can afford to avoid the stingy. I can do this, and I am told that I should. 

1 John 3:17 But whoever has the world's goods, and sees his brother in need and closes his heart against him, how does the love of God abide in him?

 

It doesn't.