New Orleans Was Called Resilient After Attack. It Didn’t Need the Reminder.

The city was seeing glimmers of optimism for what the new year might bring before the horrendous attack on the French Quarter.

As the old year ticked off its last minutes, New Orleans seemed ready for the new one.

The city had gone through a rough stretch, but things were looking up. The gun violence that surged to harrowing levels during the pandemic had fallen off dramatically. The Super Bowl, returning to New Orleans in February after a dozen years, promised an influx of visitors and excitement. And the city’s best season, the exuberant weeks leading up to Mardi Gras, was on its way.

But less than four hours into the new year, a heavily armed man slammed a truck into the celebrating crowds, leaving dozens wounded or dead on the city’s most carefree street.

In the news conferences that followed, the mayor of New Orleans and other leaders in Louisiana praised the city’s residents for their resilience amid disaster. It’s a message they had heard before.

“The word ‘resilient’ has become synonymous with the city of New Orleans,” Lesli Harris, a city councilwoman, said in an interview, acknowledging that the quality was a source of both pride and exasperation. “We are resilient because we have to be.”

Many people in New Orleans have expressed a certain comfort and satisfaction at the strength of the community’s bonds and its collective ability to navigate disaster and hardship. Yet they also wouldn’t mind being able to get by without having to draw on a reservoir of grit and good humor.