Reply #18: Poor Leadership drowned us, poor leadership continues to drown us [View All]

[garthranzz]

Facts first: Katrina itself didn't destroy the city. It was less than Category 3 when it made landfall, more than 25 miles from the levees. The Corps was underfunded for five years, recommendations were ignored, and politics - local but mainly state and federal - made a pork picnic out of the levee and wetland projects. But even after the levees broke, nothing was done to stop the flooding, or drain the city. The water sat for weeks. In places where the water drained within a few days, as in Jefferson Parish, structures, though not contents, were salvageable.

We have no leaders; those who can lead are in legislative, not executive positions. Nagin's a joke, Blanco's ineffective and Bush - criminally negligent is too kind. The city's broke, there's an entrenched power elite, racially divided - upper-class uptown Republicans put Nagin back in office, despite his blatantly racist campaign. The Blacks (especially a lot of the ministers) keep their power and patronage, and the Whites keep theirs.

Crime is back up, economic development turns into Wal-Marts and carpetbaggers and education - the public school system may yet turn things around, but not without parental involvement.

People who came back, determined to rebuild, are leaving. The middle class is getting squeezed out by lack of business and greater costs: utility bills have doubled.

The demographics have changed. Many of the poor Blacks won't or can't come back, and the Hispanics, many of them the illegal work force, are settling in. Some areas - like New Orleans East where my parents lived - are so devastated that only patches of people live there. In a sense those areas are worse off than they were thirty-forty years ago, as they began developing, because then they could build from scratch. Now there's a veneer of disintegration everywhere.

Yet there are those working hard, trying to not only recover but revise, to get past the old prejudices, the ingrained laziness (Mardi Gras over commerce, politics of and as entitlement, etc), and the drunken stupor (Bourbon Street is for tourists anyway). It's hard.

The federal government owes us - more than it owed NYC after 9/11. But without decent leadership, civic committment, oversight, accountability and transparency, etc. - well, why feed Haliburton again?

We have a narrow window of opportunity, to recapture and expand. (Ironically, the major economic engines - tourism, the port, petrochemicals - were largely undamaged by Katrina. The French Quarter was almost unscathed.)

See my poem, The Magnolia Tree, and the soon to be posted, Algae in the Lagoon - which, a friend remarked, we may soon be if we don't grab this chance.

(By the way, there are many, many here - Black, White, rich, middle-class, poor - who do "get it" and are working very, very hard to revive New Orleans.)

And don't say "under sea level" - that's not the reason.