Tourists: New Orleans Needs Your Help

We need you to come here, spend money, have a good time, and help this city and everyone in it whose livelihoods depend directly or indirectly on the tourist industry make it through the year.

The 4+ months from the New Year through Mardi Gras to Jazz Fest are when people make all the money that will last them through the long, long summer doldrums until things pick up at Halloween - that’s all the servers, chefs, musicians, hotel cleaners, tour guides, gallerists, retail clerks, cab & Uber drivers, buskers, bartenders and everyone else who make visiting and living here so fun and wonderful.

It’s easy to give into fear, but life is full of risks, and if we let all the forces - from religious fundamentalists to Silicon Valley billionaires - who want to divide us and keep us barricaded inside, frightfully scrolling through their propaganda / profit centers, prevail, then what kind of world are we left with?

I for one am going to go out, keep having fun, keep dancing, keep drinking, keep talking to strangers (especially strangers who come from different places, cultures, political backgrounds, religions, ethnicities, and economic circumstances than I), keep spending money and tipping 50% when I can, and keep insisting that life is far better lived in a community of real people interacting in real life, people who don’t always see eye-to-eye but who are still able to share a song sung on a karaoke stage, a bunch of beads caught at a parade, a round bought at a bar, or a laugh at a sly joke cracked by the guy drinking Fireball on the corner.

In other words, I am going to keep being a New Orleanian, and I hope you will keep being our beloved tourists, so that together we can show the world what it means to let the good times roll, no matter what! (And so that my friends and neighbors can roll through the summer with enough dough to pay the rent and buy a sno-ball now and then…)