People Get Ready

We’re still here.

Despite those who said New Orleans wasn’t worth rebuilding, who falsely alleged that the whole city was below sea level, who pointed to the sins committed by visitors to argue that God was punishing us, we’re still here. Those of us who can be here, that is.

We returned as quickly as we could, because notwithstanding the extraordinary generosity of other people in the places where we sought refuge, this is our home — the place, its history, its culture, its food, its music, its people — it oozes into the pores, and sinks into your bones. We wouldn’t trade it for any other, because there’s no other like it.

There are still hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens scattered throughout the diaspora. They too long for home.

In the media blitz to seize the nation’s attention this week, we’re supposed to think today is a day that’s different from all the others. We’re supposed to relive those moments when Hurricane Katrina’s storm surge rode ashore, busting the federal levees wide open, scraping homes off of their foundations, sending the physically able racing for their attics, and inundating the rest.

We’re supposed to remember those who were so tragically lost in the worst federal engineering disaster in history.

I don’t know what it is — exhaustion I suppose — but I don’t feel any different today, on this two-year anniversary, than I did last year, or any of the other days since the disaster. That’s the thing — we’ve been re-living the memory of the disaster every one of the last 730 days. Today is no exception.

There isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t have an image in my memory of the mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, aunts and uncles, grasping to save themselves and their children as the water raged around them. There isn’t a day that goes by when my memory doesn’t conjure what I’ve fortunately only heard in stories, of people trying to swim against the tide, grabbing for treetops or roofs — or lodged in trees dodging roofs and other debris as they raced past.

Every day’s headlines remind us of the tragedy which struck this beloved city two years ago. The headlines are often a call to action, forcing citizens to once again rise up in protest at the real failure which occurred two years ago — a failure of public institutions at every level of government in the wealthiest nation in the world to respond to emerging crises, to protect the natural environment rather than destroy it, to engineer infrastructure projects which protect us from harm, and to invest in improving the prospects of future generations.

No, there isn’t a day that goes by when we here in New Orleans don’t remember that tragedy. Today, 8/29, should be remembered throughout the nation in the same way that other tragic dates are remembered. We were attacked by an ideology of destruction on 9/11, no less than we were attacked by an ongoing ideology of depravity and destruction on 8/29 — the only difference is that the latter was a product of our own culture, and a political system of undermining vital public institutions for the last 37 years while financing the military-industrial welfare complex.

The disaster which happened two years ago was just the leading edge of disasters to come if we don’t respond as a nation like New Orleanians are trying to respond every day to the challenge of the century — the challenge of the millenium — to rebuild our public institutions as ethical, efficient, transparent, democratic, and capable of responding to the crisis of global climate change — as well as the many other multiple crises we confront. We understand that here in New Orleans, that crisis is unfolding sooner than it is anywhere else. How our nation responds to the need to save New Orleans is a bellwether for how our nation will succeed in a future filled with many more challenges.

As we saw with the bridge collapse in Minneapolis, and the flooding in New York City and throughout the Midwest, what happened in New Orleans is no different from what can happen anywhere else. As New Orleans goes, so goes the rest of the nation.

All Americans should have learned by now that defending New Orleans is no different than defending their own communities. We’re all in this together.