A Carolina native, I have lived in New Orleans by choice for forty odd years.  As in any important love affair, it has been a love-hate relationship, with the balance tipping back and forth wildly.

Each time I go away for a period of time certain characteristics of the city, both superficial and deep-seated, slap me in the face immediately upon my return.  The squalor of the city is one of those characteristics. 

These underpaid men took pride in doing their work and doing it at breakneck speed so as not to hold traffic up to the point of boiling tempers.  They race down the street behind the garbage trucks singing, shouting rhythmically, making their own music and picking up the bags like a chorus line. They move gracefully to their own beat, waving and bowing to pedestrians and drivers, like the born performers they are, flirting outrageously with the women walking the sidewalks in time with them.  

Unless you have been in New Orleans on Ash Wednesday, pre-Katrina, of course, you cannot imagine the level of competence I am talking about. When you retire from the Fat Tuesday madness, your last image of the city is mounds of trash, broken beads, and party garbage above your ankles everywhere.  It is the debris of more than a million souls letting it all hang out until the clock strikes midnight and the season of repentance begins.  When you awake, ready to take the ashes, it’s as if a miracle has occurred.  Overnight 99 per cent of the trash disappears.

New Orleanians do have pride in their surroundings.  You can see it if you walk down Royal Street or Bourbon Street in the French Quarter or through the Garden  District early in the morning while men and women are putting out trash for the morning pickup, hosing down sidewalks, washing down the fronts of their houses and watering balcony gardens.  There has been evidence of civic pride in all of the city’s neighborhoods.  Some citizens in each neighborhood, however, cannot afford to indulge their desires for a pristine neighborhood.

Ours has been substantially a poor town with a vast economic gap between the relatively few wealthy persons and people living below the poverty level economically.  It has not been a headquarters town even for the oil industry, which in concert with the U. S. Corps of Engineers, has wrecked the Louisiana coastal environment and drained off all of Louisiana’s real wealth for cities elsewhere, such as Houston. There have been but few good-paying white-collar jobs in the industry for Louisianians, who have had to settle for the low-end jobs. It takes a good job to pay for all the water it takes to wash your sidewalk and buy garbage bags for trash.  Water is expensive here because the city fathers, reluctant to impose taxes on business, instead opt for regressive taxes such as enormous service charges on water and sewage and the service charges are based on metered use of water.   So, it’s not surprising when cleanliness takes a back seat to economic survival in the city’s poorer neighborhoods.

Too, New Orleans is a 24-hour town, allowing people to raise hell all day and all night, with at least one bar able to boast that it does not even have a door to close. Before our incomparable sanitation crews could get one mess completely cleaned up, the litter was piling up again.  New Orleans is a place where guests do things they would never even think of doing at home in Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, Seattle, and Minneapolis.  Trashing the Crescent City has come to be a national sport.  Now, without our own competent people to take care of it, much of the city looks like a landfill in the making much of the time. 

The rules that kept the trashing of the city somewhat under control have gone by the by.  And in high contrast to pre-Katrina days, garbage pickup being carried out by imported workers is at least 50 per cent less competent and not at all entertaining. 

New Orleanians have offered their city up as a place of freedom, a place where people from all over the world can come and act out their wildest fantasies, some lascivious, some merely laughable.  It is a place where people are encouraged by the city’s laissez-faire attitudes to reinvent themselves for their own entertainment, the entertainment of friends or to, finally, become who they really are, who they really want to be. 

The rules are relaxed here out of a deep-seated tolerance.  Eccentricity and individuality are not frowned up on. Until the trust is broken, newcomers are accepted as new friends.  People do not wake up early in the morning hating. 

New Orleanians have been, without a doubt among the most hospitable people anywhere.  Even when there has not been enough food for the family on the table, the visitor was offered a seat at the table graciously, unbegrudgingly.   Although the disparities in education and jobs and wealth are enormous, New Orleanians took joy in sitting down at the table together… laughing together…crying together…taking time to enjoy one another.

Over the four decades of my relationship with New Orleans, I have always hated the fact that the beauty of many of the city’s most precious neighborhoods has been marred by trash, lack of maintenance, demolition by neglect, all due to poor education and resulting poverty.

It is not the abject poverty and, thus, the lack of a pristine physical environment that has set New Orleans apart from other American cities, however. 

These conditions exist in sections of every American city today.  During the last few years, the Federal strategy has been to sacrifice social programs for Americans, to bankrupt the country, and place untold future generations of young Americans in debt for the sake of war abroad.  The conditions in urban America are only going to get worse as a result.  New Orleans, with the help of Katrina and Rita, has merely become the sacrificial lamb to give us all a clear picture of what America is like for many of our own in the 21^st century.

What sets New Orleans apart, what makes it a treasure among American cities is that much of its citizenry for much of the time lives by the Golden Rule. 

If the Big Easy has not offered a pristine physical face to the world always, it’s best people have been next to God in their spiritual cleanliness. They have gone through life loving their neighbors, refusing to be judgmental, treating others as they would be treated themselves, forgetting to hate in their zest for life, making a joyful noise unto the lord.

That’s what I have loved about New Orleans.

If we can just get our best people back, all of those thousands of them, including, of course, our own sanitation workers, and, for God’s sake, pay them what they are worth for a change, I will still love New Orleans.

Would I want to live here without their sweet goodness, their joie de vivre, their creativity, their incredible competence born of necessity, their originality?  Not a chance.