Natchez, MS
Good-bye New Orleans. Can’t say I won’t be glad to see the back of you.
I rode alongside the Lower 9th Ward today on my way out of town. I had a hard time telling whether the desolation I saw was hurricane damage or typical urban poverty. I suspect most of what I saw was the latter although there were more than a fair share of otherwise respectable buildings (churches, restaurants, banks) with no windows or doors and no smoke stains or graffiti to indicate normal urban destruction.
It all makes me wonder. I think the Lower 9th was a dive even before the hurricane. I think it was a place without purpose in a city that was, even then, trying to find a purpose. Maybe it was destroyed for a reason. Why on earth would we attempt to rebuild a place that wasn’t fit to live in before the hurricane? Why would we try to shoehorn folks back into a place that is obviously unsuited to survive nature’s wrath? What sort of hubris blames man for the failure of man-made levees when nature decides to breach them? Aren’t precisely the same people screaming for heads over the destruction of New Orleans because man failed to arrest nature the folks screaming that man can’t do anything about global warming and that nature is sure to overwhelm any attempt man might make to arrest that?
Profoundly silly. The whole thing. I wish we’d just let places die that shouldn’t live and get on with the business of building up places that should. New Orleans should probably be pared back a good bit. The outlying areas should stay erased and effort should be put into fixing up the places worth fixing.
New Orleans is an interesting place. I’m not sure it didn’t get exactly what was coming to it and I’m not at all sure they learned any damned lessons at all.