PhotoDude.com

Wed. Sep 28, 2005

Operation Eden: The Good Son

Over the past year or so, I’ve become quite cynical about the world of web logs and what it has become. Of course, there’s as much diversity as their is in humanity, but the trend I see is a lot like Reality TV; “I’ll do considerably degrading and disgusting things, because I want to be famous!” And since I’ve decried the ugly, I feel an obligation to also point you to its plain and sparkling opposite. Because the other day I stumbled across a blog that simply stunned me, and actually made me think “this is why blogs were invented.”

It has nothing to do with the design, as it’s a basic Blogger/Blogspot site. It has nothing to do with a partisan political position, because there isn’t one (other than overall disgust). It’s about the content, all clearly directly from the heart.

You should probably just stop reading this and go there: Operation Eden, “A personal chronicle of what hurricane Katrina has done to my poor proud people.”

Oh, I know, you’re over it, you’ve seen tons of coverage of Katrina. Not like this. Clayton Cubitt is a man about whom I know very little. In fact, I made a point of not delving into his “backstory,” as it is irrelevant to what you’ll see at Operation Eden, but I gather he’s a professional photographer of some type. All I know for certain is that he’s a man who loves his family dearly, a man who may have left his poor town but never left his roots. His mother and younger brother lived on the coast right in the path of the worst of Katrina, in a home that he had bought for them using all the money he had at the time. It’s wiped out now. After the storm, he loaded up with supplies and went to find them.

He eventually made it to his mother’s home in Pearlington, Mississippi, where “maybe 600 of the town’s 1,700 souls — are still living in tents and under tarps. Folks here say Pearlington is an old and generally overlooked town, a place where blacks live in one section and whites in another. It’s a place without a mayor or a town government — in other words, without an advocate.”

In other words, a month after Katrina, they still haven’t gotten squat. Clayton finally convinced his Mom to let him take them all to a motel in Jackson, Mississippi, for a few days, so they could have normal things like a hot shower, electricity, air conditioning, and some news. His mother still hadn’t even seen a picture of what happened in New Orleans. It made her cry, despite all she’d been through.

But I should probably just stop there. And you should probably just go to Operation Eden, and then scroll all the way to the bottom. Start at the beginning. Put aside an hour, and go through it. It will be the best hour you’ve spent on the web this year.

It’s hard for me to even point you to excerpts, but look at this picture of his mother: “This is what it looks like when poor people have lost it all, and are told to get in line.”

Read how he felt upon “Homecoming.“

I’m fucking disgusting. An interloper in a nice rental car with air conditioning. An alien tourist with an expensive camera. A carpetbagger. These people, my people, have been brought so low. They were on the bottom before Katrina, but she’s stomped their faces into the mud, deep and black. They’re below the bottom now, if it could be believed, and it’s killing me.

And my family can’t even feel singled out in this massive misfortune. If one of them were to be murdered, or mugged, we could cry and blame and feel the warmth of a spotlight of wrongs. Not so here. One of thousands. Hundreds of thousands. A huge swarm of loss. A plague.

I can’t think. I need to state facts alone, because context breaks my heart and I feel ashamed to have a broken heart around such poverty and devastation and loss, even if it’s also mine.

The text is heart wrenching. The photos are hypnotizing. And the plight is ongoing. Upon encountering an old friend who was “like long-lost family, baked skin, wearing only faded cut-off jean shorts, bare feet”, the man told them “Get the hell out, keep going, don’t look back, there’s no help coming for us.”

Look at The Contents Of My Mom’s Life: “It all fits on a small coffee table.”

This may sound like a strange thing to say about such an obvious outpouring of pain … but this is Art. With a capital A. An unfiltered expression that moves you to a place you’ve never been before. It doesn’t just tell a story, it grinds it into your consciousness.

So many bloggers are wannabe “journalists,” wondering what sort of laptop and camera they should have to enable them to “report news.” Because surely all it takes is the right equipment. Well, Clayton touches on that, but to call this journalism would be degrading. It is far from dispassionate or unbiased, and it isn’t the “outside looking in.” It is as inside as it gets.

It’s Art. I feel like that somehow minimizes the pain of these people, or implies that’s why Clayton put the site up (when that’s clearly not true at all)... but that’s all I know to say. It made me cry. It made me smile. It made me come back and look at it again. It’s Art. It’s everything that the combination of photos and words on the web should be ... but very very rarely is.

And remember that curmudgeon who told you “you’re on your own”? Clayton is a kindred spirit, with hard experience at hand:

You are on your own. My advice to you: have lots of private insurance for everything. Have fresh water on hand. Batteries and gas lamps. A generator. MREs and Powerbars. Plenty of cash. A gun, preferably a 12-gauge shotgun. Know how to use it, it will be worth it’s weight in gold. It doesn’t matter how the destruction will come. Hurricane. War. Terrorism. But when it comes, know that you are on your own.

You are always on your own. The government takes care of itself, not it’s citizens.

Clayton’s words and photos make the case exceedingly well. His family is on its own. If there’s anything you can do to help them, please do.

Later: More from Clayton on how you can help the people of Pearlington, Ms., including an address to ship a box via UPS or FedEx to the town school. They need the simplest of things: “Packaged socks, and underwear, all sizes (and I was told by a big girl not to forget the big girls in this size request), Daily toiletries, like deodorant, shaving cream and razors, and soap (including laundry soap), Bug spray and sunblock, Daily staples like coffee, sugar, salt, pepper, Towels, all sizes…” And lots of other things we take for granted.