News Roundup

Big? Maybe. Easy? Definitely not

The Times-Picayune
Thursday, November 10, 2005
Ian McNulty

Some good things will come to New Orleans from all the upheaval of Katrina, and maybe one of them will be to bury forever the city’s undeserved nickname — the Big Easy.

As city nicknames go, it’s a lousy one. It doesn’t apply at all, and the reasons why it doesn’t show just how redemption may come to New Orleans through all this devastation.

It was always easy to have a good time in New Orleans. So easy, in fact, that if you didn’t have a good time here people tended to make ungenerous assumptions about your personality and inner life. For visitors on vacations and conventions, this worked brilliantly. When they left, packed with magnificent food and vivid memories, New Orleans remained for them the Big Easy of lore.

But making a life in New Orleans is not necessarily easy. It is not easy to find a good job in the city’s small professional sector. It is not easy to educate children in a public school system that is always doddering on the brink of collapse. And it is not easy to live below sea level, ringed by waterways and in the path of hurricanes.

But people don’t live in New Orleans because it is easy. They live here because they are incapable of living anywhere else in just the same way. And that’s the reason why they’re coming back now to rebuild.

For people who care about New Orleans, living here has long meant living in a state of struggle and compromise, of yearning for improvement. That’s because the city, with its irreplaceable heritage and culture, fulfills so many dreams and satisfies so many desires in a way nowhere else possibly could. But, at the same time, it leaves the most universal of American needs wanting — most of them economic and related to schools, jobs and crime.

The people who care about New Orleans have always fought for it.

They’re the ones who battled drug dealers for the safety of our streets. They’re the ones who fought to preserve the historic buildings and neighborhood fabric that give the city its character.

These are the people who fought the uphill battles to make our schools better, bit by bit, who fought to create jobs that can support families, who fought for fair housing and for access to the most basic medical care for their neighbors.

Coming back to New Orleans after Katrina is not easy for anyone. For some people it will be impossible, no matter how much they loved it. But it is heartening to see that the people who have fought for our city so hard in the past are among the first ones back now.

The future of New Orleans comes down to the basic choice between fight or flight. It’s a decision being made every day, house by house and block by block. Some people will return to ruined homes, vanished jobs and shattered networks of friends and decide to leave too. That’s flight, and it’s New Orleans’ loss. Others are coming back, pushing the bleach mop through their tears and learning to improvise in what’s shaping up to be the new deal for New Orleans. That’s fight, and it’s New Orleans’ future.

Hopefully, that Big Easy nickname can finally be retired as obsolete as the city emerges inevitably smaller, tougher and maybe a little smarter than before. And if we need a nickname, let’s leave it at an old one — the Crescent City, an elegant tribute to the great swoop of the Mississippi River that gave the port town its original form and purpose.

Better yet, let’s update that old nickname for more recent history. For me, New Orleans will always now be the Unsinkable Crescent City.