The Opposites of New Orleans

What is it about Louisiana and New Orleans in particular?

Hurricanes and oil spills enough to throw hundreds of billions down a hole with no result. Massive corruption at all levels. Government failures enough to fill volumes. Vice, poor, one of the most uneducated populaces in the nation and perhaps the most indolent by many standards. What a hole!

Mardi Gras, jazz, food and cooking out of this world, beauty, love of life, culture and party, party, party. What a place to be for fun!

Do we only get the one because of the other? Is the cost of all that makes New Orleans marvelous that which makes it backward and embarrassing?

Is there some sort of karmic balance at work here?

One of the great themes of literature and art is the relationship of light and dark, good and evil, wrong and right. How do we know what is good if we don’t know what is also bad. Can we appreciate light if we never know dark? It seems the basic opposites cannot exist without each other. There is no up if there is no down.

Opposites attract because they give meaning and value to each other. It is no less true in science and the physical laws. There is no one if there is no minus one. Positive electrical current flows to the negative. High pressure moves to low pressure. Indeed, the gas laws are mostly a description of matter interacting with vacuum, arguably the ultimate opposites.

If this existence of opposites is at work in New Orleans, then that should give us pause for apocalyptic reflection.

Consider that when one and minus one do come together, they add up to zero, nothing. When positive current makes it to the negative, the current dies. High pressure will flow to low until they equalize and there is no difference between them; the concepts of high and low have no meaning any longer.

Left alone, should we expect that eventually the opposites that are New Orleans will negate each other, and it will cease to be?

The only way to prevent high pressure from negating low, and vice versa, is to keep injecting energy into the system. Energy tips the balance to one side or the other and the concepts of high and low continue to have meaning and existence.

So aren’t we doing the same thing in New Orleans? So long as the rest of us are willing to pour energy into the place, whether that is tourist dollars, federal relief, or a pass on the rampant criminality and corruption, we keep the balance uneven. But what if we didn’t pour energy into it? Many folks after the Katrina debacle suggested we ought to let the place go back to the ocean. After all, much of the town is below sea level, and only continued energy inputs in the form of levees, dikes and pumps keep the place dry.

If we refused to inject energy into the place anymore what would happen. Would all of its opposites attract each other into balance, until finally it turned into a sort of Omaha, Louisiana?