I didn’t want to go to the protest.

A week before at a second-line parade, organized by the Black Men of Labours Social and Pleasure Club, a young activist had handed us a card announcing the time and location of a protest to be held the following week, December 10th, 2005. According to the card, a grassroots group called the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund and Oversight Coalition, in order to raise awareness and support for their cause, had planned a series of town-meeting-style events to take place at various locations along the Gulf Coast. The group planned to conclude its tour by hosting a protest march at Congo Square in New Orleans. The purpose of the protest was to demand the “right of return” for all displaced residents, with particular emphasis on residents from a part of New Orleans called the Lower Ninth Ward, a predominantly poor, black neighborhood. Many of the homes there had been obliterated by a breach in the Industrial Canal levee following hurricane Katrina, a breach that reopened and reflooded the community during hurricane Rita three weeks later.

Representatives of the federal, state, and city governments, as well as a smattering of New Orleans locals, both well-heeled and otherwise, had been making noises about “bulldozing” certain parts of the city – generally low-lying, poor neighborhoods – to create “flood zones” and “green spaces.” Many people who lived in the neighborhoods ripe for bulldozing had been unable – and in the case of the Lower Nine, due to the extent of the devastation, unallowed – to return home to defend their rights as landowners. Their very absence made them particularly vulnerable to the possibility of a governmentally sanctioned rip-off. The term “eminent domain” had been tossed around in public discourse with reference to the Lower Ninth Ward as well as to New Orleans East, a far vaster, also predominantly black, part of the city that flooded, and to which residents also had been largely unable to return. Someone had to stand up for the rights of the poor in exile, and I supported the cause. But a protest? On Saturday? I wasn’t so sure.

My wife Trish and I had lived in Austin, Texas during the months leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. We had attended numerous “protests” held on the lawn in front of the Texas State Capitol building. These events were always held on Saturdays. I assumed that the organizers had chosen Saturday to maximize attendance, figuring more people were likely to have the day off. Unfortunately, the government officials who worked in the capitol building, to whom I thought we should be directing our protest, also had Saturdays off. Thousands of like-minded, antiwar demonstrators would gather to distribute petitions and literature. Guest speakers would stand behind a podium and testify to an already sympathetic audience (occasionally even hectoring their sympathetic audience for not being more actively sympathetic), leading chants of dissent that echoed against the pink stone walls of the capitol building, empty, I imagined, save for a largely Mexican cleaning staff busy polishing the brass railings and dusting the stiff portraits of former governors.

“What’s the point?” I would complain with an increasing sense of futility about these self-congratulatory events. An invasion of Iraq seemed inevitable. I felt marginalized and ineffectual as a participant in a series of protests that amounted to the largest public antiwar demonstration in U.S. history. The result? President Bush affirmed our right as Americans to express our opinions, while simultaneously dismissing what we had to say. He would do what he wanted to do, and that was that. And so he did.

But our demonstrations in Austin were lame, impotent events. The organizers had applied for and been granted permits by the government, whose actions we claimed to protest, to hold demonstrations on days convenient for said government, and were encouraged to ensure a minimum of civic disruption lest the government decide to reject future applications for permission to protest.

In my first year of college, some fifteen years prior in Chicago, several student groups had organized a protest against a marginal increase in student fees proposed for the following year, a petty cause to be sure. At a designated time, we were all to leave our classes en masse and converge on the administration building for chanting and general civil disobedience. As the hour of dissent approached, we raised the issue with our professor, Ric Murphy.

“You’re asking for permission to walk out of my class in protest?” he asked incredulously. Evidently, we had misunderstood the purpose of a protest. Our professor was “the man.” It was to him that we were supposed to “stick it.”

“At least shout, ‘Fuck you, Murphy,’ or something, on your way out,” he requested after granting us permission to leave. “Just to make it seem real.”

As we scampered down the hall, giddy with revolutionary zeal, I shouted “Fuck you, Murphy,” just as the man had asked me to do. My fellow classmates laughed at my faux outrage. And so it goes.

As Bush positioned troops in Iraq for the commencement of his “shock and awe” invasion, we should have shouted in genuine outrage, in the middle of the week, in the middle of the workday, as the Texas state bureaucrats pushed the papers that helped keep the whole horrible machine chugging steadily toward war. We should have walked away from our jobs, forced the whir of commerce to a grinding halt, disrupted the steady flow of traffic, and instigated a maximum of (un)civil disobedience. We should have demanded to be heard or arrested. But that didn’t happen. We were too polite. Didn’t want to alienate “the mainstream.” Hell, a lot of people favored going to war. And no one wanted to risk losing his or her job over it. The economy seemed to worsen by the day. People had bills and mortgages and children to take care of. Some people even liked their jobs, just as we had liked Ric Murphy’s class. And really, we just weren’t angry enough to disregard the relative degrees of comfort to which we had grown accustomed, not outraged enough to put ourselves out. It wasn’t like the invasion would really affect us, right? Not directly. Who’s going to risk jail time for some distant moral ideal? And, gosh, the moral arguments for and against war seemed to get so complicated so quickly. And anyway, the President had made it perfectly clear that our opinion meant nothing to him. So to ease our frightened consciences, we would gather on Saturdays for a few hours, when it was safe and sanctioned, and blow off some steam at an empty building.

When Trish asked whether I wanted to attend the protest on Saturday at Congo Square to stand up for the rights of the poor in New Orleans, I restated my old complaint; I’d lost all faith in protest, by which I mean parading with a permit, corralled by the government, and marginalized by public opinion, an utterly ineffective means of influencing anyone.

“What’s the point?” I asked.

“When they write about it in the newspapers and say however many people showed up, at least we’ll know we were two of them,” countered Trish. She’s good like that. The least I could do was be numbered among those who said, “No.” So we went to the protest. Besides, I was curious to see how a post-flood New Orleans protest differed from the pre-war Austin protests.

“You think they’ll have a band?” I asked as I parked the car across the street from Congo Square just before noon. Trish scoffed. Or at least I thought she had scoffed. She later denied scoffing. “And beer? Do you think they’ll have beer? It is New Orleans.” This time her scoff was unmistakable.

As Trish and I passed beneath the arch at the entrance to Armstrong Park, in which Congo Square is located, we heard the sound of drums puncturing the cool, December air. Two men, two drummers, on a metal bench, one on conga and one on djembe, had already begun to set the protest to rhythm.

“It’s Congo Square, not conga square,” I joked, acting like a real square.

Trish and I stopped and stood, aloof like cats in the very center of the large, circular “square,” taking in the scene. I felt separated from the activity around me, like an interloper or a spy. I didn’t imagine myself better than everyone else, but insulated from them, acutely self-conscious – detached. From this central perch I hoped, or at least tried to hope, to transcend my cynical opinion of the efficacy of conventional public protest.

“Definitely more black people,” I observed. The antiwar protests in Austin had been decidedly pale affairs. This observation proved to be more than demographic, just as the protest proved to be about more than housing.