Coronavirus, and a Lesson from New Orleans

Right now, New Orleans is experiencing a failure of its coping skills.

This is a city that knows hardship. My New Orleans-set novel, Unbreak Me, put it like this: “We’ve had floods and fires, yellow fever and locusts. Might as well be a paragraph out of the Bible. But we’re still here. Nobody with the spirit of this place in them ever quits. We just turn a funeral into a second line, dancing away from the graveyard. All the time knowing it ain’t our last trip.”

New Orleans has weathered more than arguably any other American city and it has come back from all of it in style.

You can see all of this best from one of my favorite bars in the city. It’s an outdoor patio built around a lush stand of trees. It’s got a thirty-foot line of beer taps dispensing craft brews flavored like anything from a peanut butter cup to a bowl full of herbed citrus. Daily rotating food trucks pour out crawfish by the gallon onto tables so everyone can feast. It’s a delightful, guilty pleasure of a monument to hipster gentrification. And yet, the freshly milled lumber of its patio overlooks the hulking corpse of a hospital, abandoned since Hurricane Katrina with graffiti fringing its edges and old air conditioning units rotting off its windows. Joyful abandon amidst the symbols of past suffering is quintessential New Orleans.

This is the land of the hurricane block party, where people have always weathered hardship by banding together, playing music, feasting and partying.

These are not the coping skills that serve you in a pandemic.

Currently, I’m sitting out the Coronavirus pandemic in New Orleans. Being in one of America’s oldest and most tumultuous cities has made for an interesting perspective from which to watch history being made. The drifting of laughter and the smoke of charcoal-grilled meat have been replaced by the apologetic whoop of police sirens on Bourbon Street, the bullhorns giving a strangely quiet lecture about the danger of large gatherings to public health.

But it’s not just New Orleans, is it? From California to New York City, we’re all cooped up inside, watching our whole world shut down around us while we count our rolls of toilet paper and try to figure out how long this thing is going to last. Stay calm, the TV tells us, with a NATIONAL EMERGENCY banner screaming across the bottom of the screen. Next up, we’ll tell you the next round of what aspect of normal life is cancelled today.

Everything from the bare grocery store shelves to the ghost town streets is sending the clear message, “This is not normal. Protect yourself from danger.”

The first thing humans do to comfort each other is to embrace. Now, we’re told to keep our distance. The only place it’s safe to interact with each other is on social media, which is a virtual sewer where all the worst of human anger and fears have always collected.

The only way to get through this is to constantly battle our natural instincts: for social media to be a place where the most intense messages of anger and fear are the ones that are passed the most quickly. To fight our instinct to group up with our people to feel safe. To fight the feeling that tells us, “Nothing is okay.” But this isn’t Ebola, and it’s not nuclear war, and thank god for that.

The reality is, this isn’t going to be comfortable. All normal life is going to be interrupted. Many people will get sick, a few are going to die, and hospitals are going to get really busy for a minute. A ton of us are about to get a whole lot broker than we were. Many businesses will fail and a couple are going to boom. And on the other side of it, we’re all going to come out a little more skittish, with a fresh awareness of how fragile our beautiful social order really is. Probably also with some of that behavior we used to laugh at our Depression-era grandparents for, hoarding food and toilet paper because “you just never know.”

So, take a lesson from New Orleans. It wasn’t that long ago that some of them came home to find their houses full of mud, and located in the middle of the street instead lined up neatly behind the sidewalk. They know what it’s like for their town to look nothing like it did last month. They know, better than most of us, what it’s like to feel as if nothing is ever going to be the same again.

And for a little while, it won’t be.

In New Orleans, they started by shoveling the mud out of the living room. They kept going by laughing together when they found a dildo that’d washed out into the street next to a cracked statue of the Virgin Mary. New Orleans wasn’t rebuilt in a day, but the reason it was rebuilt instead of abandoned was because its people never forgot how to laugh, how to choose hope instead of despair, and how to lend a hand to each other.

We will get through this, y’all. In the meantime, be kind to each other.