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Naïve Orleans: The Ignored Poverty

So fair warning this is probably border lining on a completely emo blog, but I have to share my heart about our experience in New Orleans this past week.
We have toured all across the US from Austin to Atlanta, from St. Louis to Nashville... it doesn't matter where we go we seem to encounter something in each city that we didn't expect. Such was the case in New Orleans, LA... but to an extent that couldn't have been anticipated by any of us. Here you have a city that has, in the past two years, suffered from a blight not experienced before on American soil. Pain, agony, homelessness, poverty, starvation... each are daily occurrences for nearly 20% of New Orleans CURRENT population. All of these plagues in plain sight, yet it somehow goes unseen by so many.

It strikes me as a jaded form of irony when you take into consideration that less than a mile away from a "tent city" set up for the homeless there sits a multi-million dollar football franchise, a billion dollar trump tower under NEW construction (post hurricane Katrina), and thousands of suit-clad businessmen that seem to ignore the extreme suffering around them.
New Orleans is a city surrounded by so much controversy, invaded by so much turmoil... a city full of poverty and overflowing with disappointment. The air was thick with oppression... the streets that we walked on heavy with the pain of broken dreams... and that is exactly what attached itself to me as we walked... brokenness. I began to feel the broken lives of an oppressed people. The very lives that go un-noticed on a daily basis. It is then that I realized where we as a people have begun our folly... we are "willingly ignorant." We are spoon fed what is easy to digest. And most of us are none the wiser, partaking of our daily rationed diet of commercialism and self aggrandisement.
So lets make a pact to change our role in this production we call society. Lets become aware, lets turn your eyes in a new direction and see what we have ignored. Lets choose to become conscious of our surroundings, so that little by little we can extend our area of influence, make an impact, leave a legacy, and... change the ignored.
Mucho amo,
Clint

Snowy Virginia

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