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New Orleans, Anyone? Anyone?
By: Natalie Pye '07
STAFF WRITER

Most of the time, when atrocities occur, it is easy to allow them to gradually slip out of our minds, once the shock passes. Most of the terrible things we hear about in the news happen far away, to people we don’t know, and it can be difficult for us to make time in our busy lives to give to those who have suffered more than we can even understand.

For the most part, these events don’t directly affect our daily lives, so it’s easy to mentally prioritize, placing more local concerns first. But what happens when the atrocities are local? What do we say to ourselves when our complacency has allowed one of our own cities to fall into ruin? What do we say about New Orleans?

Katrina hit almost two years ago, so the appeals from the Red Cross and the harrowing news coverage has faded from the general consciousness. We want to assume that after the debacle that was our government’s response to the hurricane, efforts in New Orleans have transformed into a healing force. We want to believe that “The Big Easy” is restored. Surely after so much time has passed, the levies have been repaired and reinforced, the National Guard is no longer needed to patrol the streets, children are in school, and people can move back to their houses, right?

Sadly, the answer to all those questions is no. Congress is dithering over the $32 billion price tag of rebuilding safer levies—it’s expensive, but a pittance compared to the $300 billion allocated for the war. The National Guard still patrols certain neighborhoods, warning civilians to call them, not the corrupt local police, should an emergency arise.

At the beginning of the school year, there remained almost 5,000 students without a teacher. Of course, that figure only covers the children who were in school; many children, especially in the devastated Ninth and Seventh wards, are not attending school, in part because they have no school to attend.

Some neighborhoods, most notably the Garden District and the French Quarter, are habitable and attempting to reclaim the rich culture that is the birthright of the city. Others are not so fortunate, and while grassroots organizations and nonprofits attempt the cleanup, they are frequently stymied by a deeply entrenched drug trade and the police who facilitate it.

There never were enough FEMA trailers to house those made homeless by Katrina, and new reports and a budding class action lawsuit indicate that formaldehyde in the trailers provided may be giving hurricane-survivors respiratory illnesses. After the deadly 2005 hurricane season, we promised New Orleans that we would rebuild it and never let that destruction happen again.

We’ve made these hollow promises to other countries before, but are we really going to allow the slow death of one of our own cities? The people of New Orleans are fighting for their city; they are rebuilding, they are playing music, and they are trying to live life. But what happens when the next hurricane season arrives?

The patched levies won’t withstand a direct hit, and even a sideswipe from a powerful storm could flood the city once more. We can change the channel when the news is about Iraq or Darfur, but how do we ignore the willful loss of one of our oldest and greatest cities? How do we commit the crime of willful ignorance against ourselves? Are we really going to ignore New Orleans?