"How to Rebuild a City and Country in One Very Hard Lesson"

Reading: "1 dead in attic" by Chris Rose

“Introduction:  The cryptic title comes from the notes that the National Guard spray-painted on the fronts of houses and buildings in New Orleans in the aftermath of the Storm. “1 dead in attic” is what they found at one particular house on September 5th, 2005. Author Chris Rose is a writer for the New Orleans Times-Picayune; what follows is a compilation from his book.

“First of all, we thank you. For your money, your water, your food, your prayers, your boats and buses and the men and women of the National Guard, the fire departments, hospitals, and all the other volunteers who have come to our rescue.

“…How did we get here? What happened to my tough-lovin’, hard-luck, good-timin’ hometown? Mercy.

“I have cowered in fear this year from the real and the imagined. … I have wept, for hours on end, days on end. The crying jags, I guess they’re therapeutic, but give me a break. … People in public are stoic and patient, public meltdowns being as common as piles of debris in this town...

“This event has come to define our city, our lives, our destiny. Nothing comparable has ever happened in modern times in America, and there is no blueprint for how we do this. In the days after It happened, everybody went into operational mode: Survive. Wing it. Do good work. Save someone or something. Call your relatives and tell them you’re OK.

“You’d have to be crazy to want to live here. You’d have to be plumb out of reasonable options elsewhere. Then, again, I have discovered that the only thing worse than being in New Orleans these days is NOT being in New Orleans. She’s a siren calling us home. It cannot be explained.

“'They don’t get us,' is the common refrain you hear from frustrated residents who think the government and the nation have turned a blind eye to us in our time of need. Then again, if they did get us, if we were easily boxed and labeled, I suppose we’d be just Anyplace, USA. And that won’t do.

“You probably already know that we talk funny and listen to strange music and eat things you’d probably hire an exterminator to get out of your yard. We dance even if there’s no radio. We drink at funerals. We talk too much and laugh too loud and live too large and, frankly, we’re suspicious of others who don’t.

“The only way you could understand is if you have been here, and so many of you have. So you realize that when you strip away all the craziness and the bars and parades and music and architecture, really, the best thing about where we come from is US. It’s a tale so often told that it borders on platitude but it is also the searing truth: We are the music. We are the food. We are the dance. We are the tolerance. We are the spirit.

“We are what made New Orleans a national treasure. We’re good people. Don’t be afraid to ask us how to pronounce things – it happens all the time. And when you meet us and look into our eyes, you will see a trace of the saddest story ever told. Our hearts are broken into a thousand pieces.

“But don’t pity us. We’re gonna make it. We’re resilient. After all, we’ve been rooting for the Saints football team for over 35 years. That’s got to count for something.

“OK, maybe something else you should know about us is that we make jokes at inappropriate times. But what the hell.

“So come see us. We will repay to you all the hospitality and generosity of spirit you offered to us in the season of our despair. That is our promise. That is our faith.”

Sermon:

So, today is Superbowl Sunday, and Tuesday is Super Tuesday for the primaries.

That is also Fat Tuesday, the culmination of the Carnival season, which began on January 6. Though I'll be watching the Superbowl as well as the primary results with much interest, my heart is in New Orleans.

I certainly miss New Orleans, especially the pre-Katrina Crescent City that was so full of life and music and fascinating people. Our family lived in New Orleans for six years in the 80s when I was the minister of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans. And we loved that grand old city in spite of its many problems.

Today it's a ghost of what it once was. Though you'll still hear great music in the French Quarter and eat delicious food all over the city, once you leave the French Quarter, and the downtown and uptown areas, you enter into a wasteland of abandoned and bulldozed homes with sprinklings of FEMA trailers and businesses.

But thankfully the people of New Orleans haven't given up on Mardi Gra.

Our family would line up for as many parades as we could go to throughout the Carnival season, and like most New Orleaneans our attic was drooping from boxes of beads and other Mardi Gras paraphernalia.

Life in New Orleans since Katrina flooded the city has been difficult.

Certainly New Orleaneans still party at Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest and other events during the year, but it's a much different city than before the storm.

It's a city in crisis, many of its people scattered around the country, and those who remain live a frontier existence with an uncertain future.

Since the storm struck the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005, people have been talking about not only how to rebuild New Orleans but whether it should be rebuilt at all.

Some say that it will cost too much to rebuild and protect the city. Though the levees are being replaced, they will still not hold the waters back from the biggest of storms.

And the wetlands are so depleted and damaged that they are little protection against the next hurricane. Others say that the city is just not worth saving, that poverty, a failed education system, crime out of control, among many other problems, would mean having to rebuild the entire infrastructure from the bottom up.

But those who promote turning our backs on one of the major cities of our country forget that New Orleans was an essential port, a center for oil refining, and it's culture was one of the most unique and rich in the country. And let's face it: many of the problems New Orleans has experienced in the past exist in other cities as well.

Which of our cities, including Washington D.C., are not plagued by poverty, crime, and dysfunctional schools?

And which of our cities should we write off because of the likelihood of manmade or natural disasters? Should we have bothered to rebuild San Francisco after the earthquake of 1906, and since a major earthquake is inevitable should we evacuate those who live along the San Andrea fault? Should we close down New York City and Washington D.C. because they've been and remain targets of terrorist attacks?

New Orleans is a city we need desperately. But it's misfortune is also an incredible opportunity to start all over again -- not only rebuild a major city but reinvent it as well. It's a city that could become a showcase for America.

It's not too late. What if all the best planners and architects and visionaries were brought together and asked to create a city of the future, a city where we could try our most innovative ideas for transportation, industry, education, housing, health care.

New Orleans could be a laboratory where ideas are tested and implemented.

Then it could be a model for all of our cities. It could also be city all Americans could be proud of, proud that our government had been caring and competent enough to save this wonderful place and its people, and proud that we could reinvent it in a way that could help all of our cities and our nation to reach a greatness they could have never achieved without New Orleans.

So, how would you reinvent New Orleans? How would you help the people recover and heal, provide services and homes, and how would you prevent such a disaster from happening again? Not easy questions to answer, but they are questions we should be asking and answering, not only for New Orleans but for every major city in America.

And they are questions I would like to hear our presidential candidates answering.

Alan AtKisson in an article called, “Dreaming a New New Orleans,” writes that the first thing that needs to be done is to dare to dream what could be. There is now a fatalism about the Crescent City felt by many people there and around the nation because the government and many Americans have given up.

The only way that fatalism can be defeated is to dream of future possibilities.

AtKisson writes that, “It takes courage to dream in the face of catastrophe. And courage often comes from being encouraged, with the thoughts, wishes, hopes, words, and yes, the dreams of others. We can all contribute to the recreation of New Orleans. We can all dream for her, and help her residents to dream. They have now lived through a nightmare -- one that many feared would one day become reality, and has. We can all now help her to dream a beautiful dream of recovery, restoration, and renewal, and to make that dream become real as well -- for herself, and for the world.”

Our first priority and dream needs to be to protect the city and its inhabitants from future disasters. We know that Hurricane Katrina was not a natural disaster. It was a social, political, human, and an engineering disaster. The past can't be changed but the future can. By protecting New Orleans we can better learn how to make other coastal cities secure as global warming raises the sea levels around the world.

The city needs to be protected from the worst case scenario, a Category 5 storm, or people will not return and rebuild. We certainly have the technology to build levees large enough that will protect New Orleans from a Category 5 hurricane. We only need the will to make it a reality.

But levies are not enough. In fact, our greatest ally in protecting the city is nature itself. By drilling in the wetlands, cutting channels, and building levees, a million acres of natural protection against storms has been destroyed. We need to rethink the management of the entire river system by learning how to work in conjunction with nature instead of in opposition.

The wetlands must be restored by building floodplains instead of levees along the river south of New Orleans and then channeling the river through canals and pipelines into the wetlands allowing the sediment that is now being washed away to rebuild the marshes and islands. That means nature needs to be the highest priority and drilling and other destructive technologies must stop. The wetlands must be protected and rebuilt so that they can protect not only New Orleans but the entire region and eventually the nation.

Next, we need to dream of a New Orleans without poverty, a city that offers training and decent jobs with decent wages for all its citizens, with the understanding that economic poverty leads to a poverty of spirit that affects all of us. Katrina pulled the veil off poverty in New Orleans, showing how vulnerable it leaves the poor. It also revealed the color of poverty as African Americans scrambled to survive in the aftermath  just as they have struggled to survive every day of their lives in a city and nation that devalues their existence. Katrina's accomplice in killing many of those who died was a dehumanizing poverty.

What for the most part has not been done and should be done is to create living-wage jobs by training and employing local residents to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. People also cannot escape poverty without a decent education, so the schools need to be rebuilt as well and a quality education provided for all children no matter their race or class.

And the poor deserve livable homes, and that means affordable housing should be available to all. You may have heard that all the public housing in New Orleans, whether it was damaged by the storm or not, is being torn down without replacing it.

The cities solution to the problem of poverty seems to be to keep the poor away.

And what if – what if – New Orleans became a showcase for our nation and the world of a city that was as green as green can get? What if all the environmental problems that had plagued the city in the past, including exposure to toxic chemicals and a badly polluted river, as well as all the environmental problems caused by the storm, would be cleaned up – which could provide needed jobs for those who are poor.

And then what if the entire city could be rebuilt as a place that would take full advantage of renewable energy. With its bright sunlight, solar panels could sprout like flowers on every building and home. The thousands of new homes and buildings that will be constructed could be provided with the most modern energy saving and renewing technology.

As Alan AtKisson writes, “The city could become a living laboratory for solar roofs, mini hydro generators, architecture that creates cool buildings without air conditioning, electric and fuel cell vehicles ... the whole list of green dreams for a technically sustainable world. These could become the basis of new industries to replace the gas and oil revenues, and be partly financed by them...”

These are just a few of the many possibilities for New Orleans. These items will cost money—though less than extending tax breaks for the super-rich or a few weeks of the war in Iraq – and a lot more productive I might add. This is what we need not only for New Orleans but for every city in our country.

But to achieve any of this we need to learn one very hard lesson. And that is, we need to care. We need to care about the people of New Orleans. We need to care about the people of all our cities who are suffering from the manmade disasters of poverty, lack of health care, an inferior education, environmental deterioration, and so much more. We need to care about a fatalism that affects us all, making us less of a nation and less of a human being. We need to care, and once we care the bright dreams will come, and then the urge to make the dreams come true. As Thomas Edison said, “If we did all the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astonish ourselves.”

There is hope for New Orleans, and that hope is in the people who love the city so much that they are willing to live there without a home to inhabit, without many of their family and friends, without decent jobs and schools. As a New Orleans resident put it: "The fact of the matter is, everything I believe, how I view the world, everything that I have accomplished through my work and how I live my life, I owe to New Orleans.  To turn my back on her now, like she was nothing more than a one night stand, would be criminal." [ Eliot Kamentz in the New Orleans Times-Picayune 5/5/07]

The other hope is embodied in all those who volunteer to travel to New Orleans to help rebuild the city. Tens of thousands of people from churches and schools around the country have paid to stay in dormitories and eat peanut butter sandwiches so that they can give hope to the people there. As the minister of First UU Church, Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensinger told me, “Everyone who comes to New Orleans to help us becomes a bona-fide New Orleanean, and they become our voice to the rest of the world.”

I'm proud that our church has sponsored three trips to New Orleans so far, and I will be leading a fourth at the end of April. We will spend five days working hard, putting up drywall, painting, cleaning, tending abandoned pets, and other jobs, and then we will spend a weekend enjoying the incredible music and food of Jazz Fest. We'll experience the hardship, the pain, the struggles of the people of New Orleans, and then we'll experience the amazing culture that we cannot let die.

I invite you to join us. Eleven people have already signed up, and there are only nine places left. I invite you to make a difference for the people of New Orleans and for yourself. All you have to do is care, then dream, and then swing a hammer.

So may it be.

Inspiration & Resources:

“Don't Refloat”, The case against rebuilding the sunken city of New Orleans.

By Jack Shafer, Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2005, http://www.slate.com/id/2125810/

“Dreaming A New New Orleans, Version 1”, by Alan AtKisson http://tungwaiyip.info/blog/2005/09/05/new_new_orleans

“Rebuild New Orleans, Rebuild America,” by Toni McElroy and Kevin Whelan, http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2007/02/05/rebuild_new_orleans_rebuild_america.php

“Time for a Tough Question: Why Rebuild?” by By Klaus Jacob, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/05/AR2005090501034.html