You're Not Alone

We have our "transient population", New Orleans has "The Oogles". We thought you might enjoy hearing another city's perspective.

A lot of the September 2012 Antigravity Magazine article reads much like the comment threads here on Uppercasing the last few weeks:

Councilwoman Stacy Head attacked them in a 2010 City Council hearing for being a threat to French Quarter tourism, characterizing them as “the gutter punks…the Vassar graduates with dogs and a trust fund… the Phish fans.” I don’t want to be on the same side as Stacy Head, and yet in a city where ten-year-olds tap-dance for dimes, watching sullen, sallow scumbags on hobo vacation suck up money and resources that could go to our community’s own poor folks is infuriating.

“There are positive kids,” Amber said, “but every year it seems like more and more of them are hateful and disrespectful, just super fucked-up all the time.” Like tourists, oogles can be drunk and belligerent. A friend who is himself sometimes homeless took offense to being panhandled on Decatur, told off the kids spare-changing him, and was badly beaten up for it. Drunk oogles disrupt events held in parks or other public places– I’ve witnessed them aggressively and at times violently interrupting poetry readings, music performances, and community meetings.

However, the overall gist of the piece articulates the feeling of ambivalence toward the street kids. They're extremely visible, annoying, obvious targets, and often a convenient place to project bigger societal frustrations.

Outsiders who waltz through town, soliciting money from New Orleanians who’ve weathered flood, economic devastation, and institutionalized racism from government, banks, police, insurance companies… could there be a more powerful symbol of disrespect? Coca-Cola spray-painting advertisements in the French Quarter and Mountain Dew bedecking the Lower Ninth Katrina Memorial with “DEWEEZY” stickers both come to mind… but those big faceless corporations are boring and futile to hate, whereas the white kids panhandling in the Eighth Ward are right there in my face, on the un-air-condtioned side of my car window.

While I was in sympathy with these sentiments, almost everyone I know makes a living catering to tourists. Don’t the oogles deserve some credit for refusing to prostitute themselves, for refusing to be entertaining or charming? I can respect a refusal to “earn” money; I respect refusal in general. Philosophically speaking, responding to 21st century America by getting drunk and riding trains and not giving a fuck seems like a perfectly valid enactment of alienation.

Another article from October 2012 by NoLa Tour Guy makes some similar points. It's hard not to quote the entire thing, but here are two choice excerpts:

Well, unless you’ve had your head up an American Flag for the last 20 years, the opportunities for anyone besides the wealthiest have all but dried up across America, while the price of rent, goods, and services has increased. The opportunities our parents’ generation had are gone. Now put yourself in the shoes of a 15 year old from Muncie, Indiana. Your father’s house is getting foreclosed. He’s drinking himself into a stupor and you can either be making $7.25 an hour at Walmart or go riding trains with your pals. Which one would you choose? ... Some of you might argue that higher education is the solution, that the theoretical 15 year old oogle could just go to college, study a field that they enjoyed, then secure a well paying job; but the reality for most young Americans is that instead of higher education being a gateway into the middle class, it’s just another source of debt, another bill that $7.25 an hour job has to pay. The ability for oogles or anyone below the poverty line to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” is becoming increasingly impossible.

my point is that the worst things that have been done to New Orleans have been done by corrupt elected officials, many with the “best intentions.” So to be clear, I’m not trying to excuse many of the foolish things oogles do, but a little understanding of the situation can go a long way. Instead of using oogles as scapegoats for New Orleans’ problems, we should examine what those problems are and how we as individuals and our city government fit into them.

Anyway, we thought you might enjoy the NoLa perspective on one of the Haight's signature issues.