Talk about making money off people’s misery and desperation. This takes the cake for running, jumping and standing gall:
For $35 per person – $28 for children – a New Orleans company is offering bus tours of some of the city’s most misery-stricken spots, including the Superdome, the Convention Center and neighborhoods ravaged by Hurricane Katrina.
Residents disagree over whether the tours are crass and morbid exploitation, or a good way to help people grasp the enormity of the disaster and keep public attention focused on New Orleans’ plight.
The three-hour tours, called “Hurricane Katrina – America’s Worst Castastrophe,” were announced last week by Gray Line New Orleans, with the first one set for Jan. 4.
I saw the hippie tours of the Haight-Ashbury on one of CBS’ news reports during the Sixties. I didn’t like it either. Especially when it turned into a virtual shooting gallery after the Summer of Love. The news crews ran through again. And black folks, who were mostly populated in the Lower Haight area at that time were caught up in the heroin madness, too.
Here’s more:
The buses will start at the edge of the French Quarter, then drive past the Superdome and Convention Center, where thousands suffered in the heat for days without food or water. The tour also may include the destroyed marina and neighborhoods like the flooded Lakefront, Gentilly and eastern New Orleans areas.
Company vice president Gary Hoffman said he intends to show “the utmost sensitivity” to those whose homes were destroyed. After all, he said, they include about 60 percent of the company’s 65 pre-Katrina employees, including himself.
The company will give $3 per ticket to Katrina-related charities, he said. The tours will use major thoroughfares only and employ minibuses rather than big tour coaches, Hoffman said. Smaller streets and the Ninth Ward will not be part of the tour because “that would be too intrusive,” he said.
Hoffman also observed that tourists are already going through destroyed neighborhoods on their own (and risking angry survivors and environmental waste). Might as well make money off it, he figures.
Unfortunately, victims can still be seen on city streets, with some living in tents and in cars near their wrecked homes and who are trying to salvage their belongings. One critic, in the Reuters’ version of the story, had this to say:
“There should be tours, but they should be linked with people who are displaced and coming up with a plan of action,” said Corlita Mahr, a hurricane victim who works with the grassroots People’s Hurricane Relief Fund.
I still don’t like it. People have a right to their own privacy, not only in their homes, but even in their own communities.
I asked someone from the Orange Zone recently to take exterior pictures of my old home in New Orleans. But s/he went further than that. S/he ventured into the ground floor of the house but stopped at what had been the living room and dining room. While the door to the house was wide open, and the house appeared from the photos to be completely empty, s/he did not go further into what had been my grandparents, my mother and I’s bedrooms, and what we called the back room “out of respect.”
I was glad to get the photos. We no longer own the whole house and the last time I was there, I could not get access to the lower level, which has had few tenants since we finally left New Orleans in 1968. The foundation has long been undermined by the shifting, waterlogged soil. The flat, which took in the entire length and breadth of the house, would flood without benefit of rainstorms.
I would not be surprised if the house was bulldozed and knocked down. I would mourn, because it took in the first fifteen years of my life. I had the feeling that my grandparents’s shades were still there, and that was why no one could live there any more. As s/he sent me the photographs over e-mail, I would tell him/her who lived where, where my grandparents’ big radio was located in the house, and the Queen Anne chairs and dining room table, and the fact that the wood floors have been replaced by cheap linoleum, that my grandmother’s third and last husband put in the tile that still decorated the pathway, and that there were once trees and bushes and flowers and lizards and mosquito hawks and cicadas. And where Mr. Joe’s bar once stood next door. And that it was almost all gone.
Memories are all that is left.
But respect is something that appears to be missing out of the Gray Line owner’s plans. For every house, store, park or church, people dwelt and made love and joined prayer circles and practiced dancing the second line, and made groceries and grunted at their TVs and laughed at Morgus the Magnificent and lived out their lives.
New Orleans is not a zoo.
