2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Your sanctimonious bullshit is wearing a little thin [View all]SunSeeker
(51,550 posts)Yes, you're right about the partying. But there is also serene beauty. The flash of a white crane against a brilliant green tree canopy, the graceful strands of spanish moss swaying in the velvety warm breezes blowing through the live oak trees. The bayous, teaming with catfish and crab, sometimes you didn't even need to put bait on your hook. That's how it was in the 1970s anyway. But even then, as a teenager, I saw the scars and filth the oil drilling was leaving. I vowed to devote my life to fighting pollution.
Then, my family moved away and I found myself in Los Angeles. I now love CA and have fortunately managed to work in an environmental field for the last 17 years, but I still miss New Orleans. And I miss the friends I grew up with. We discussed progressive political ideas even though at the time we did not know enough to put that label on them. We were definitely not the majority, but there were lots of little pockets of blue like us in that deeply red state.
I am glad you are continuing in that tradition. It's folks like you that gave me the courage to pursue my dreams, but it was the beauty of New Orleans that gave me the dream in the first place. And please know that if I do say something snarky about the South, it is not directed at you, or the folks like you that I knew and loved when I lived there. It is directed at the backward mouth-breathing Southern majority that made my life (and my friends' lives) a living hell at times and whose politics have trashed the paradise that was the Southern bayous.