Ray in New Orleans: Children of Men of New Orleans

« Y'all just jealous | Main | Nine cocunut custard pies! »

April 5, 2007

Children of Men of New Orleans

While canvassing with Common Ground last month, I wandered briefly through Joseph A. Hardin Elementary in the Lower 9th Ward. It was a sad and lonely place, untouched since the storm.

Then last week, while watching Children of Men for the second time, I was reminded of it when the protagonist and his cohorts are sheltering in an abandoned school. It was a similar scene...art work on the walls from kids who are who knows where, writing on the blackboards from classes long forgotten.

What's weird is that it never occurred to me why there would be an abandoned school in the film. Everything in Children of Men has a purpose, every backdrop makes a statement. State-sponsored suicide kits, immigrant concentration camps, "foogees" and "fishes" and End-times cults...everything is exactly in its place. But it only just now occurred to me that in a future without children, all schools would be abandoned and desolate. I missed the point of it completely. It's like my mind just glossed over it, because abandoned schools are such a fact of life where I live now and so it seemed unremarkable in the movie.

Anyway, when Athenae of First Draft took a picture of the front of the Hardin school, and I mentioned to Scout that I'd been inside, she asked if I wanted to go back to take pictures and I jumped at the chance.

Scout's pictures are here.

Mine are in a flickr set here.

But here are a few samples.