Molly Peterson

Commentation

..as 43 might say.

My good friend Eve Troeh had a commentary on the Katrinaversary.

You could hear the hurt in her voice. But it was nothing compared to the hurt you could hear in her voice in Courtroom A about a week ago, when she had to confront the person accused of attacking and robbing her.

The two year mark has come and gone, and life continues here. When things have been tough here, people have looked really closely at each other, and asked, “are you going to stay?” I get this a lot, because I’m a newbie, because I’m from California, because my hesitation is palpable.

I’ve read some blogs judging Eve — along the lines of, mug a liberal, find a conservative, or dismissing her as a dilettante, a flighty passer-through who never committed to living here.

That’s not fair to her, and it’s a way of understanding the city that can’t possibly nourish it. New Orleans is a port town, a place where cultures have always mixed, where new blood has melted together with old blood, where people have long come and gone. What that means is there’s more than one way to love this place. If everyone had to be a 7-generation Uptowner, it wouldn’t be the city that so many people would love.

To criticize people for leaving is as un-New Orleanian as telling other people they’re going to hell is un-Christian. It misses the purpose entirely. And New Orleans will be a step closer to healed when that stops.