Something about first snow. Why is that first falling and covering of white crystal so mesmerizing, so miraculous seeming? Each winter it’s breathtaking to wake up one morning to branches heavy with white powder, blanketed ground.
And the lights seem to twinkle on trees earlier each year. Before I know it after yellow and orange leaves sensuous in autumn, blink blink, the trees are winking. It’s true, there’s something magical, fairy tale like about the snow and the lights. Perhaps it’s that we have made it through another year; we can still fantasize, gather together, sip hot cocoa, run around with torn mittens and lips too cold to say words right. Every year I pronounce I’m done with winter, that middle age has taken away my love of frosty breath circles. Then the wonderland, the promise of cozy family reunions by the fire, and I’m back, taking out the menorah, oversized socks to hang on my sister’s mantle Christmas eve, candles everywhere, and Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Whales” to read aloud.
Then there is the other side of it, that extravaganza of lights and front yard displays-- whole lit up villages – reindeer and Santa’s on lawns representing a dimension of decoration I’ve never quite understood. I know it means a lot to people; I just don’t know what. Like so much of our country, it seems like the goal is more, shiniest… most. I wonder particularly in these energy worry days, just how much electricity the flood of holiday lights expends.
This season I can’t stop feeling something else about the lights as I drive by one beautifully lit tree after another, even as I sigh with a kind of relief that we can still enjoy the beauty, and perhaps an inner relief that I can return to warmth, light, home, that no matter where I’ve traveled, into what pain and danger, I’ve always so far been able to come home.
On September 12, soon after a storm called Katrina swept through New Orleans and the Gulf Coast revealing the waves of neglect and disregard that cursed poor black communities long before the storm; I went to Jackson, Mississippi and New Orleans with a friend in response to a call issued by the newly formed People’s Hurricane Relief Fund & Oversight Coalition. I was fortunate due to an unforeseen change in my work plans, to be able to take a week. I had been searching for which effort made sense to me to join. When I read the call for PHRF I knew this was the one for me because the commitment is for self determination in all aspects of relief, recovery and reconstruction for the people hit the hardest, abandoned the longest. The call is for the right to go home, union jobs in rebuilding, money to reconnect families. The coalition aims to function as an organizing mechanism for those with the least money and the darkest skin, left on rooftops as rescue planes flew by and levies told the truth about power.
We arrived in Jackson, Mississippi one hour after the PHRF began to set up their office. We did what you do when going into a war zone, offer solidarity – answer phones, write things, go to the post office, whatever is needed. We stayed with young organizers and educators from the Young People’s Project, children of the Civil Rights Movement, who dazzled us with their talent, commitment, warmth and strength. My one day in New Orleans and Algiers just across the river where white vigilantes had terrorized the black community in the wake of Katrina’s winds, was inadequate in time, but imprinted in my mind and heart the image of apartheid, war and abandonment in America. The Red Cross hadn’t come. FEMA hadn’t come. Humvees and Blackwater security personnel cruised the streets. The police had looked the other way when white men randomly shot black men, graffiti sprawled across doors: We Shoot Looters.
The looters turned out to be every government agency. The people getting shot had been written off long ago.
Thursday and Friday, December 8th and 9th the Coalition, led by community groups from New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, people of color, are holding a national meeting in Jackson, Mississippi to create a permanent oversight committee. Saturday December 10th they will march in New Orleans to demand justice for the displaced people.
In January, being launched on Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, the Finding Our Folk Tour, part of the PHRF, initiated by the Young People’s Project, and endorsed by an education committee convened by Macarthur winning author and educator Lisa Delpit (Other People’s Children), will take young leaders, speakers and artists through the south to “raise the voices of Katrina survivors and connect them with the voices of America’s survivors, the brothers and sisters in all corners of the country who remain on the margins of citizenship.” These young people are paving the way for democracy, or at least for some truth at a time when denial has blinded the collective vision and eroded the soul of a big piece of this country.
Weeks ago, when the first lights began to flicker on again in New Orleans, the city became a patchwork of electricity. Some neighborhoods had lights; others, even nearby, remained dark. Since hearing this I have been haunted by the simple, harsh truth – the exact visual image of where the lights did or didn’t go back on. I’ve been trying to think of what could be done during this holiday season, with lights, to show the true solidarity of people who have not forgotten, will not forget the people who were left to die by the officials, to say: lights for all or lights for none. I don’t know, in the magnitude of pain and need, whether a symbolic action of turning lights off for five minutes and then on again on Christmas Eve, or New Year ’s Eve, would mean anything.
What I do know is that we as a vast country of people have the capacity for great compassion and generosity. That has been proven, last year with the Tsunami and again with Katrina. Those few days in the office in Jackson I saw the countless expressions of solidarity and desire to help. I believe, based on that and what I’ve heard and seen since, that enormous numbers of people in this country do have the heart to give. The question I ask is do we have the will to look at the truth and act on it? My holiday challenge is to insist that we look deep into the skin of our history, into our own mirrors, and ask ourselves what we can do to make sure there are never never any more broken levies, no more stranded people of any color, that safety is never preserved only for those who can pay for it, that we insist upon change, and that we seek out, as one of the leaders of the coalition has said so often “ the hidden genius in each poor black community” and shine the lights on that genius. Shine the lights.
Kathy Engel
Sagaponack, N.Y.
December 6, 2005
For more information on the People's Hurricane Relief Fund and Oversight Coalition:
