Réflexions
It is not my intention to incite in my students a bitterness or resentment vis-à -vis the draconian events of the past, over which neither I nor they had any involvement. Even if we wanted to, we do not have the ability to erase the past and rewrite history, or to take it back. Rather, I choose to remain stubbornly Pollyannaish in my belief that enlightening students can help us work together to forge a better tomorrow. My vision does not include the cliché of a future in which society no longer sees black or white, but one in which we seek them out and marvel at the beauty of what black, white, and every gradation in between have to offer. To comprehend and appreciate the current state of affairs in the Big Easy is to view New Orleans as a microcosm of society that transcends time, and to be aware that all over the globe, we are still living out the vestiges of the distant past, and in a very real sense, we will be forevermore. While on the one hand intangible heritage and history are never really behind us, on the other, they run the risk of slipping away, or evaporating, much like the subjunctive has from English – and to a lesser extent even from the French language I teach. However I do often remind my students, much to their chagrin, that le subjonctif still lives! Perhaps as educators we can devise a way to teach our students to act as human sifts, keeping all that is worthwhile and good about times past, gleaning important lessons from the negative things, while at the same time allowing all that was bad to be filtered out and discarded, as effectively and as automatically as our kidneys can rid our bodies of harmful toxins - a process that I suspect few people could describe as compellingly and as articulately as Mark Saltzman. Until then, it would be a grave injustice to New Orleans, not to mention that it would make for a far less interesting study, if I did not share with my students the plain and simple truth that NOLA was and still is a "mess." 3 7
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