O c t o b e r    2 0 0 5 Radio host Yugen Rashad's topics, opinions and insights tend to be controversial, entertaining, and to the point... caveat emptor! - ed New Orleans The Night the Melody Stopped by Yugen Rashad By now everyone in America knows Hurricane Katrina created a natural catastrophe when tons of water came crashing down on New Orleans. In a matter of a few days the city known as the birthplace of Jazz music, great southern cuisine, and popular tourist attraction became a watery cavern of immense sorrow and displacement. Even the storied refuge Congo Square, a site the enslaved African would go for peace and solidarity was awash in toxin waste and debris. In the days that followed a clearer picture of its toll on the city emerged as the waters receded. The amount of money needed to rebuild isn’t the only question. Katrina revealed a government’s historic neglect of New Orleans’ poorest of poor. Until that time every thing was fine with the jazz and food visitors became addicted to. They could pass by the homeless, the red light district, and the wayfarer, following the sound of music to the storied night life, celebrity entertainment, and ambiance. How to, or better yet, should the city be returned to its pre-hurricane luster is the question. Economic development, affordable housing, cost of living adjustment to wages has never reached the predominately African American population of the city. If the damaged home of Jazz music is to be retrofit with a new infrastructure does that mean social, political and economic equity for the disenfranchised? Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans is famously known for The French Quarters, The Bayou, jazz, gumbo, and festivals. If he were to have his say one could surmise that a teachable moment has arrived. Those proponents of reparations for African Americans could make its strongest argument to a government yet to offer any measurable regret or apology for the psychological and material albatross the decedents of slavery carry to this day. New Orleans is the birthplace of jazz. A land where some of our most important artists call home. Celebrated for a music steeped in the field holler that echoed across the slave fields of the South. But the call and response that held that community together must now wait for the soldering of resources to repair and restore from a neglectful government of conservatism, unless of course the topic is financing war or U.S. imperialism around the world. New Orleans really is a metaphor for Black Americans struggling against disproportionate indicators of health, economics, and quality of life. And now one of the groups most cherished cultural symbols is in shambles. New Orleans is where the old meets the new, in an orgy of historic retrieval. A city bursting with emotive powers steeped in the jazz and gospel traditions. Where the French and Southern palates collide, creating some of the best tastes worthy of repeat. The jazz, the food, and second-line dancing and rhythms in the streets just outside the window. And for a horrendous pitch of days, these sounds were drowned out by a 15 foot soup of toxins, floating bodies - a gushing murk. We can’t imagine the city’s ambiance ever being the same even while a tome of grieve and sadness hangs in the air that was once filled with the sounds of bustling crowds - and all that jazz. Like we said earlier before the disaster hit, New Orleans was a tell of two cities: a vacation spot for the mid-brow and up; and a society ridden with crime, disparate incomes, and a poverty that, depending on measuring tool, is a snapshot of a Third World in America. Katrina revealed an economic devastation the federal government paid little attention until the hurricane waters showed the double standard America must face up to. The soul of New Orleans was demonized by nature’s rushing waters. A soul that needed purging from its forgetfulness or straying down the path of Sodom and Gomorrah? A demon tide that visited a terrible grief that washed away everything not nailed down. But the soul is sustainable. New Orleans, like its history, doesn’t rely on FEMA or Homeland Security, or a lethargic president to validate what is a human, spiritual, and a living culture. FEMA nor Homeland Security folks have a clue about ancestral legacy or spiritual competencies. No. And like Mr. Bush, a recovering alcoholic, abstinence is not the greatest indicator that individual healing is all it takes to purge a family, a community, from the scourge of an addiction to narcissism, and fiscal irresponsibility. Sometimes the angels take it upon themselves to calibrate the compass of the soul for people to remember to remember. The Black folk are a unique people with a biblically based history. A people so ensconced and resembling so many proverbs and psalms, sometimes must be shaken to be stirred. But the people described in Genesis, chapter 1, verse 26, and again in Isaiah chapter 14, must answer a different question. The question is what is the price to pay for disobedience, and squandering resources. In either case, the melody harmonizes a judgment we all recognize in America - New Orleans is just the litmus test.