For the residents of New Orleans, who are still waiting two years later for some kind of response from our government to the plight of those affected by Katrina, it is very understandable how cynical one might become. I personally can't understand how our President, who claims to be a christian and uses every media moment possible to reiterate that, can basically turn his back on the very people who put him in the office he is now in. Instead, he pours millions of dollars in a never-ending quest for peace in Iraq. Don't get me wrong, I completely respect and admire those who are fighting and putting their lives on the line for us. However, I do feel that we need to put more dollars into our own backyard and take care of those who help make our country great. I understand that the media wants to help their ratings by getting the stories that grab our attention first. I feel though, that they really miss the stories that get to our hearts. It is these stories that make us stop and think about the big picture and what is really happening to these people. I live in a city that received quite a few of the displaced. I can't understand how insensitive the people in my city were to those people in their time of need. I heard more than once that 'they got what was coming to them' or 'New Orleans was a sinful city anyway'. Who are they to judge? My time in New Orleans was spent enjoying the great food, the ornate architecture, the fun atmosphere, and the friendly people. In my own town, if I were walking on the sidewalk and passed someone, they would not say a word. In New Orleans, people I had never met would say 'good morning' or 'hello'. What the people of New Orleans need is RESPECT. With that respect, would come assistance to regain some of the normalcy to which they are accustomed. With that respect would come an effort to reunite split-up families. With that respect would come an effort to give them some kind of housing to where they could establish new roots. I hear of celebrities who donate money to help restore New Orleans, but I never hear about the government doing anything more to help out. Have they forgotten this happened? I wonder if it would be any different if it were their families that were displaced? My prayers are with you in New Orleans. God is always with you even when everyone else has deserted you. Lean on Him and He will bring you through.

I'm from New Orleans and I'm glad to see someone trashing the established narrative about my city. Almost every single article I read in the national press gets it all wrong in ways that are both subtle and glaring; what they all have in common is a desire to push some political agenda. The right doesn't care and they don't hide it. They are greedy, unscrupulous wolves and relish their cruelty. The left, on the other hand, seems to operate more insidiously: the sick delectation with which they hustle to the camera old black ladies who watched their grandkids drown and who think white people blew up the levees is disgusting. As this article illustrates, the left's perverse obsession with victimhood at the hands of authority and the narrative constraints it imposes automatically disqualify the boring, everyday crime that is truly hobbling New Orleans right now. I am not a Republican or a right-winger but I am disgusted by the left's sickly ideology and bottomless appetite for those carefully selected, picturesque instances of injustice that allow them to remain in a permanent state of shrill, hysteric, victimhood. The national Katrina narrative is no more or less accurate than the 1987 hit "The Big Easy". "The Big Easy" was very inaccurate.

I love New Orleans but NPR was interviewing these single mothers (who felt it was best not to use birth control and have her 4 keening little bastards with 3 different guys) complaining about the stress on her and her children that they were living in a shelter, couldn't find work, etc. For fucking crissakes, who held a gun to her head to demand she procreate with every guy she fucked? Is it that difficult to get free birth control from Planned Parenthood? It is not societies responsibility to wipe the chin of every moron who continues to squirt children out is abscence of all logic and reason. No sympathy, sorry.

It seems that there may be a risk to life and property no matter where people choose to live, but that doesn’t mean that the risks are all as potentially great.

Our ancestors did not have the ability to modify their environment in order to mitigate naturally imposed risk, so they were generally careful about where they chose to locate their permanent settlements. Because of evolving technology we can now make where we live safer by degrees from natural disaster. You don’t see the kind of death toll from earthquakes that occur in this country, or Japan that you see in poorer ones. Recent quakes in Peru, Pakistan, Iraq and Turkey resulted in both massive destruction and loss of life, primarily because the un-reinforced stone and mud homes so common in the third world collapsed killing those inside. While the Northridge quake in Los Angeles resulted in a great deal of property damage; there were very few deaths because of modern building standards. Those standards have been made even more rigorous in light of what was learned from such events.

But just because you can mitigate the risk doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a good idea to live somewhere. Seismologists tell us that California has a major quake about every 100 years. New Orleans faces the very real threat from hurricanes every year. Settlement there began on high ground because of the necessities associated with commerce, and as technology improved it became possible to expand the habitation of larger and larger tracts of sea level, and eventually below sea level land.

It would seem that Katrina represented a kind of a tipping point as far as New Orleans fight against the river and the sea. You can restore the city but does it make sense from an economic social or human safety standpoint? I could argue that from a social aspect it does, that this has been home to people for long time, and you can’t just rip up roots and move whole families somewhere else. But to some degree the city’s inability to get back on its feet may be an indicator of a weak economic foundation, and perhaps it would make sense to encourage those with fewer financial resources to relocate to a less risk prone area.

New Orleans is always going to be a hazardous place to live, but it also occupies an important place and serves an important role in the commerce of the country. I think that people who have to live there because of their work or because they like the city and can afford to will stay. If that’s you, more power to you. I don’t on the other hand believe that we should invest hundreds of millions of dollars to reclaim what time and tide will always reclaim, whenever the pumps stop running.

Just because you can live somewhere doesn’t mean you should. If you must, at least have a lifeboat handy, and an axe to chop thru you roof to get to it.