Editor B for BBC

BBC Radio Five asked me to record a segment for a show they’re doing next Monday, I think. I don’t know if they’ll use it, but you can listen for yourself now [mp3 audio, about 5MB].

Update: Here’s a transcript.

Hi. My name is Bart Everson, also known as Editor B. I live in Mid-City, New Orleans, and after the levees failed, about six months ago, our neighborhood was flooded.

My house took on about five feet of water for a couple weeks. My wife and I evacuated with our three cats and returned to find half our possessions destroyed and half our house uninhabitable.

But we really consider ourselves lucky, because there’s so many people who’ve lost so much more.

We moved back into our house in early November, or late November, lived there without electricity for about a month. Actually, we got our electricity turned on just before Christmas. We’re the only people living for blocks in any direction, with more and more activity in our neighborhood every day now. So in some ways, things are looking up/.

Yesterday afternoon, I was trying to record this segment, and I was walking down the street in my neighborhood. I saw a neighbor of mine sitting out on the front porch of his home. I went up and started talking to him, and he invited me to come in and take a look around his house, which was also flooded. Of course, it’s a rental, and the landlord hasn’t done anything to it, so it’s been sitting there for six months and just, well, there’s mold climbing the walls. It’s — it was really heartbreaking to see my neighbor’s possessions just all ruined and virtually untouched for all these months. When I came back out, he was in tears. He was crying. He was a Vietnam veteran, 20 years older than me, and he was just completely broken up.

What made it so numbing for me, though, was just knowing that the story is being repeated over and over again. So many people’s lives shattered, so many people who don’t know what to do or where to go, don’t have a home, don’t seem to have any prospect for improvement.

Short — shortly after that conversation, I went down to St Charles Avenue, to see some of the parades, some of the carnival parades that are gearing up now. I was not feeling very festive. In fact, I was just kind of sitting on the sidelines, feeling like I was bringing all my, all my other friends down. I didn’t want to be a wet blanket, but it just — the whole, the whole thing seemed kind of frivolous and silly.

Until, until one of the more satirical parades, the Knights of Chaos, came by, and their first float depicted George W Bush as Satan himself, and that just made me laugh, and that kind of lifted my spirits.

And carnival does bring together all segments of society, rich and poor, black and white, young and old, everybody was there. The crowds were thinner than in previous years, but still, you had a complete cross-section of New Orleans society there, celebrating in the face of adversity. And it’s that, that kind of sense of, of tragic gaiety that I think just might get us through to a brighter future.