A word on New Orleans

Usually I don't watch 24-hour disaster coverage on television. There have been a small handful of times (September 11th, Tsunami) where I've watched a lot more than usual. Hurricane Katrina wasn't on the top of my list because I spent most of my teenage and early adult years hearing regular alerts and foreboding commentary. So I guess I didn't really think that Katrina would be all that bad when it actually hit. I must admit that I am shocked by the amount of damage. I've been to most of the places affected and I lived in New Orleans for over four years. I was quite happy to leave that area behind. But, still, nobody deserves this kind of horror.

New Orleans is a great historical city steeped in its own strange and dark culture. The mood there is always a bit somber and disturbing. The poverty, juxtaposed with the ostentatious wealth, often literally on adjacent streets, creates a perpetual tension. It is a racial and economic clash, literati vs. crippled masses. The heritage of the French, then Spanish mixed with Creole and Cajun, white Southern gentry and Black sharecropper-turned-project-dweller have all made an indelible imprint on the city and all it's very different neighborhoods (they call them wards sometimes...an indication of how much on the brink of chaos it has always been).

It doesn't surprise me that now, when the city may truly and finally be washed out the way the Army Corp of Engineers has always feared, the people have either fled for safety or stayed to find themselves under seige and pilage. I can only imagine what the vast green lawns and the limestone and brick buildings of Tulane that have been the shining gem of the New Olreans elite must look like now or what will become of them as the waters from Lake Pontchartrain fill up the bowl of the crescent city, connecting it to the muddy Mississippi.

I'm not totally callous. I do feel great remorse for the people who will have lost everything including, probably, some of their dearest. And sadness for the loss of the city itself as it is really and truly one of the most unique architectural and cultural places in the world. I have a few friends there, still. Plus, I know that the state of Louisiana is functionally bankrupt and the city of New Orleans may never, ever be able to recover itself to its former level, thereby taking away the only real source of revenue the city or state had (which was from tourism, mostly). It's a bad situation, maybe the loss of a whole civilization like in ancient times.

New Orleans was once a great lion that attracted all of Europe, but it is no New York City and it seems it may go out like a lamb.