Loading...
Loading...
Click here if you don’t see subscription options
Kevin ClarkeJune 02, 2010

Walking through the city of New Orleans, it is all anyone can hear. Whether tourist or native, everyone speaks of the oily creep washing ashore across the Gulf, the unnatural disaster unfolding across a city that has barely begun to emerge from the devastation of Katrina and a similar alarming, horizonless impotence. "No oil in here" says a sign across the entrance to a largely empty French Quarter bar.

"It's pretty much all anyone talks about," says Susan Love, a New Orleans bar tender, who declines with a coy smile to defend the authenticity of her NewOrleansian surname, after another loud discussion of the city's increasingly tenuous future subsides at the bar. Everybody's scared here, she says. "It's affecting so many people; it's affecting a way of life. You know it's not just the fishermen." It's seafood wholesalers and truckers and area contractors and waiters and waitresses, the entire Southern Louisiana economy is teetering on the edge of the Deep Horizon debacle. What part of the local economy that doesn't depend on the Gulf Mexico depends on tourism and that is all sinking into the murk.

"People are not coming here," says Susan Love. "They're afraid. They're afraid of breathing the oil and they're afraid of breathing all the dispersant agents on the oil.

"I'm afraid to breathe it, too," she adds, cracking open an Abita beer. "But you can't be too afraid," she says, turning from her cash register. "Life happens; deal with it."

Kevin Clarke

 

Comments are automatically closed two weeks after an article's initial publication. See our comments policy for more.

The latest from america

Despair is easy for anyone who takes seriously the call to love your neighbor as yourself. But hope can come in two ways.
Thomas J. ReeseJuly 16, 2025
A Homily for the Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, by Father Terrance Klein
Terrance KleinJuly 16, 2025
The majority of survey respondents cited their Marian devotions as having played an important role in the discernment and living of their call to religious life.
A young woman kneels and prays at a pew, looking toward the altar of a Catholic church. (iStock/roman_sh)
I have questioned the ethical implications of belonging to an institution with so many members sympathetic to MAGA politics. But I can still rediscover the hope of the Eucharist in my parish.
Kathleen BonnetteJuly 16, 2025