Home for the holidays in December, riding my bicycle through the French Quarter, I passed a man standing on the corner of Royal and Ursuline. Palette in hand, beret on head, he was painting a post-Katrina picture, a Creole cottage with its roof covered by a bright blue tarp.

The tarp, an immense piece of crinkled plastic, is a predominant image in New Orleans these days. It symbolizes this current interim phase; the damage has been temporarily halted but is far from fixed. There are many such symbols, like the rows of white aluminum FEMA trailers filling formerly vacant lots around the city. The trailers are usually empty; the organization moves so slowly to hook up utilities. Each empty trailer represents somebody waiting to come home. Meanwhile, many homeowners are living without power as they wait for a trailer to arrive outside their home.

Tragedy defines the image of the new New Orleans. Most people see the blue tarps rather than the houses. Images of death and destruction, misery and suffering, have replaced centuries of living. When I tell people where I’m from it’s painful to watch their faces contort as they try to decide how to respond.

I’m not trying to deny the existence of any of the major problems allowed to flourish in New Orleans’ tropical climate, e.g. racism and corruption. But when thinking of New Orleans we need to really try to transcend the images that were unrelentingly pounded into our skulls for months following the storm.

Sadly, the image is being reinforced by disaster tours. The “must” for any tourist now is a drive through the Lower 9th Ward, head and camera sticking out of the passenger window. Though I think that a certain fascination with the macabre is intrinsic to human nature, I’ve never been a rubbernecker. I still haven’t been to Ground Zero; I saw enough on television.

While most New Orleanians I talked to said they didn’t mind the disaster tours if they were going to help people remember, former residents of the devastated neighborhoods said they aren't ready to share their sorrow yet and resented all of the strangers staring. There are different ways to experience an event; some are respectful and others intrusive. Do you go to a funeral just to watch the spectacle? Maybe if it’s a second line.