Ashley Morris
Ashley Morris and Alan Gutierrez by Alan Gutierrez
(Ashley Morris: This Is the Last Post)
The written work of Ashley Morris has led me though the emotional stages of the recovery, from the muddled hope, to the outrage, to the concentrate of conviction that makes us a city defiant.
Ashley Morris embodies the fantastic love that one feels for this City of New Orleans and this great American society and the trauma one feels when it collides with the self-serving lies and the childish sentiments of petty people stoking the national cancer of apathy. The people who rationalize the fates that befall us to relieve themselves of their obligations to their society.
This apathy is a devil.
Ashley Morris would remind me that, each time you shake the hand of this devil, a part of your humanity dies forever and can never be reborn.
In the time I lived in New Orleans before the flood, I did not live in New Orleans culture. I lived in a culture removed.
It seemed that I increasingly lived a life in a customer service culture. A culture where your role in society is that of customer instead of citizen, where the greatest injustice is to not be made whole when a product or service fails you, where suffrage is equated with spending and you truly believe that you can vote with your wallet, where you express your righteous indignation, not at the grave social injustices that eat away at the core of the American spirit, but at the truly oppressed and downtrodden Americans, or if they are conveniently out of view, at the waitress who let your coffee get cold.
It is a very involved apathy, were we invest ourselves in our relationships with our vendors, our customer service relationships. It is a charade of democracy, where we’ve convinced ourselves that brand A will suffer now that we’ve sworn allegiance to brand B.
It is a life where brands are mistaken for causes. Where convictions are matched to target markets. It is a land of opinion, where everyone is entitled to their opinion. Everyone can speak their mind, because when they do, there is absolutely nothing at stake.
Ashley Morris taught me one priceless lesson. It was a lesson that I was slow to learn. He told the story of his deep seated disgust at a dining Chicago couple sharing their opinions on New Orleans with an evacuee in the weeks after the storm.
In polite company, you do not stifle someone as they express their opinion. We are told that people are entitled to their opinions. We do this out of deference to free speech. Out of respect for oneself and respect for others a person will not lie or insult, yet they will express their unfounded, uninformed, caustic and fatal opinion on a matter far removed from their own experience.
Perhaps, it is because we’re constantly cultivated to have a sense of entitlement, so that we can feel entitled to financially overextend ourselves. When the radio or television speaks to us in the familiar it does so to goad our sense of entitlement. In the second person the advertisement tells us what it knows about you. You have discerning tastes. You demand the best quality. You work hard. You deserve the best.
You are entitled to your opinion.
You are the customer and the customer is never wrong.
At Arbor Brewing Company in Ann Arbor, Michigan in December of 2005 a sharply dressed couple was telling me about an NPR piece they heard that morning about Savannah, Georgia. The piece on Savannah compared Savannah to New Orleans. They suggested that I might want to go to Savannah now that the New Orleans is gone.
I could not find the words.
I continued to speak with them, to draw them out on their casual observation. Not to accuse them, but to get them to understand how what they’ve said might have been inappropriate.
I could not find the words.
It was not until I read Ashley’s tale of his Chicago evacuation that I found the words I needed that evening.
Although those words had been at my disposal for over year, I’d still not embraced them. Not until I’d read how Ashley came to find them. He acted and considered later what made him act. He’d not used profanity in his writing until the day he wrote those words. He considered later what made him decide to go blue, but he wrote what he felt at the time.
He wrote what he felt. I did not. I did not know what I felt because I did not write it. Having seen how he came to write what he wrote, I suddenly knew what I felt. Those blue words were finally my own. They’d long been embraced by many of you.
As I read about his encounter with the Chicago couple, it came back to me. To suggest Savannah as an alternative to New Orleans. Why sully oneself with this tarnished brand? Truly spoken as one customer to another. New Orleans was now an unhappy brand offering an unhappy customer experience. They were offering their insight into where to go to find the surrogate customer experience now that New Orleans would most certainly be unable to provide the sort of satisfaction that discerning tastes demand.
By reading about his analogous experience, I was able to find the words.
Those liberating words. Liberating me from the loathing of the sentiment. Liberating me from the self-loathing of politely entertaining the opinions of this couple.
It is from a great distance that the offense is so plain. It is from the shared experience that has been my privilege to share, with all of you, my true friends, that the offense is so plain.
Still, it is only after one man said what we all felt that we could begin to explore our love and passion for our city in such depth. It was only until we were able to read those words, that we could abandon our role as the subject of so many opinions. It was only when someone gave voice to the disgust and anger we all felt that we could embrace it and begin this process of bearing witness to the slow and perpetual unfolding of a great American tragedy.
I see now that I do not have to agree to disagree. There is an alternative. I can swear an oath to vigorously crush your opinions just as you would so casually crush my spirit.
For this I thank Ashley Morris.
Every couple months, a church van disgorges a payload of be-freckled Iowans just across the street from me in the midst of the drug traffic in this little murder cluster I call home in the neighborhood that no neighborhood organization wants to claim.
Every couple months, these people disembark and then set about gutting, then dry-walling, and then landscaping, the house at 929 N Dorgenois St.
These are people who will not give you their opinion unless you pry. These are people without a sense of entitlement. Their tastes may or may not be discerning, but they don’t make it a point turn up their nose. These are people who make no demands.
They came to a ruin and left a home and garden.
These are the lines that Ashley Morris drew for me.
Once you cross that line and embrace the depths of your disgust at the self-serving, you’ll find that in your embrace you now hold a devotion to the selfless and their acts of selflessness.
Once you cross that line, you can begin breathe again. Your anger dissolves. You can see clearly the quiet patient work of hundreds of thousands of citizens and volunteers.
Ashley Morris showed me the path to understanding that there is more to life than being liked. That you don’t begin to live until you cross that line. Ashley Morris proved that there is so much more to love about a man who speaks honestly from his experiences.
Ashley Morris taught me that you can find courage in your convictions, if only you make the effort to develop those convictions. You can chose to make a habit of saying what needs to be said. When you do, you’ll always find the words.
Ashley Morris is someone that we will continue to turn to, in the years ahead, because in the two and a half years of our shared experience, he stated so plainly, what was right and what was wrong. We cannot talk about ourselves and our experience without harnessing the understanding of our collective mission that he did so much to shape.
I do not want to lose any one of us. I do not want to lose any one of you. I did not want us to lose Ashley Morris. I did not want to lose you Ashley Morris. We can’t start losing people. I want you to come home, Ashley Morris, because without you, we are not whole.
6 Comments | 2 Trackbacks |
comments feed  |
Ashley made it ok to be mad. He was my source of energy when I felt like I was not being “polite” enough.
Last week I wrote a scathing e mail to the RSD attacking their commitment to New Orleans.
I thought about Ashley the whole time, and I will sontinue to think of him every time I am in the position to tell the truth. The truth may not be universal but calling bullshit bullshit when it is, is in short supply.
More truth, less bullshit
Focussed anger, effetive anger. There went a true warrior.
Indeed, I think we all learned many, many valuable lessons from Ashley and some of his fire will always burn inside us.
[...] the voices from all over the nets confirmed his impact, “and the [...]
I noticed that I didn’t mention Ashley’s death in my writing. I’ve added a link.
I couldn’t find a way to work into the post, the point that it’s not about telling off yuppies in bars, but it’s when you’re face to face with the yuppie in the bar, that you realize that you’re not that much better. You begin to speak your mind, with frequency and to your betters.
You realize, that the indignities you subject yourself to, when you are entitled to someone else’s opinion, that decency that they exploit because their are so anesthetized to the opinions or feelings of others, is the same decency that our civic leaders exploit, to tell us, now it not the time or the place, that we are gadflies, that we are obstructionist, or that there’s always someone who disagrees. The belittling, the shaming into place, can be overwhelming.
But, I’m able to ask myself, how would Ashley handle this guy. If you think that I’m bad, then you’re not prepared for the real outrage that so many of us feel. You’re getting off easy, so let me ask you my question again, and I expect an answer.
You express clearly the pain we share on the loss of our great friend and teacher.
Thank you Alan,
For your tribute to Ashley.
Thank you all for knowing that apathy is the enemy and for fighting that apathy at every keystroke. I hope Ashley will live on in our hearts and minds just as he does in Karen’s. His spirit will live on in mine.
[...] departed friend Ashley Morris as moniker for people like this. Yet, I want maintain the Think New Orleans G rating. So, [...]