My wife shakes her head worriedly when she sees the wallpaper image I’ve set on my personal computer in my home study. It’s a photograph of what’s left of my hometown of Biloxi, Mississippi: taken of a stretch of the beach in the days following Hurricane Katrina. “That’s so depressing,” she says. “Why not a picture of Biloxi the way it used to be, in happier days?”
I don’t quite know what to say about that. Perhaps a psychologist would diagnose me with “survivor’s guilt,” living my life in Louisville while my family members are tucked away in FEMA trailers on the Coast. But I think it has more to do with my scholarly and pastoral calling, biblical eschatology.
Just before Christmas, my wife and I drove the entire stretch of the Coast, the setting of most of our lives. The devastation was so jarring, I had to pull over to become physically ill. I have no patience for men who refuse to grow up, but watching that devastation finally uprooted whatever adolescence I have left. Biloxi was always where I could return, if only for a few days, and things were the same. Sure, things would change: a new pier built over here, a new dollar store on the corner there. But right there was Beauvoir, where it had been since President Jefferson Davis built it. Right there was the mall where I first saw the high school girl I would later marry. Right there was the pier where I decided I would ask her. It’s all gone now.
I’m thinking about this more today because of the New York Times’ travel section’s profile of post-Katrina Biloxi, one of the few national media outlet’s paying attention to Mississippi these days. The closing lines are chilling, at least to a son of the Mississippi Gulf Coast:
During the day, with the play of sunlight on the water and the sound of construction machinery whirling, there is a feeling that Biloxi will indeed come back. But at night, outside the casinos, the once teeming section of Highway 90 looks like the set for post-apocalyptic movie. The moon shines through the hulking remains of once massive structures. There is no traffic, no sound. The bright lights of a strip seem very far away.
It seems the answer to Katrina is the same answer carpetbagging businessmen offered twenty years ago for declining education and bad roads: the so-called gaming industry. The garish temples of commerce that addicted the populace to their wages and their cheap buffet meals. In the place of a quiet seacoast community of shrimpers, small farmers, and community businesspeople, the Industry promised prosperity and gave us a landscape of billboards advertising has-been performers at the Grand Casino and a title loan pawn shop on every corner.
Some of my friends, like me on the Right of the political spectrum, believe the rebuilding of Biloxi can happen simply through the free market, industry will take care of it. True enough, but I wonder how much more of this Industry the Coast can take. A FDR-style New Deal won’t rebuild Biloxi, but neither will replacing an Armageddon landscape with that of Vanity Fair.
In the meantime, I’m reminded that childhood is over, and things that seem permanent aren’t (2 Pet 3:1-13) . And I just realized that, without thinking, I’ve been playing repeatedly John Denver’s “Back Home Again” on my computer’s stereo system.
