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It is strange to me, how quickly New Orleans seems to have slipped from the forefront of our national consciousness. I mean, it’s still in the news, of course, but at times it seems as though the country has shrugged its collective shoulders and moved on. It’s probably at least partly because the administration has little interest in reminding us of the massive clusterfuck of their Katrina response, but still it’s odd. For all practical purposes, we lost an American city. This is what we supposedly live in day-to-day fear of the terrorists doing to us. In a sane world, the howls of grief and outrage would still be echoing across the halls of power. Instead, we’ve got a collective “eh, whatever.”
Anyway, Time magazine brings us up to date, and it’s not a pretty picture.
They’re still finding bodies down here 13 weeks after Hurricane Katrina hit–30 in the past month–raising the death toll to 1,053 in Louisiana. The looters are still working too, brazenly taking their haul in daylight. But at night darkness falls, and it’s quiet. “It’s spooky out there. There’s no life,” says cardiologist Pat Breaux, who lives near Pontchartrain with only a handful of neighbors. The destruction, says Breaux, head of the Orleans Parish Medical Society, depresses people. Suicides are up citywide, he says, although no one has a handle on the exact number. Murders, on the other hand, have dropped to almost none.
Mayor Ray Nagin opened up most of the city to returning evacuees last week, but only an estimated 60,000 people are spending the night in New Orleans these days, compared with about half a million before Katrina. The city that care forgot is in the throes of an identity crisis, torn between its shady, bead-tossing past and the sanitized Disneyland future some envision. With no clear direction on whether to raze or rebuild, the 300,000 residents who fled the region are frustrated–and increasingly indecisive–about returning. If they do come back, will there be jobs good enough to stay for? If they do rebuild, will the levees be strong enough to protect them? They can’t shake the feeling that somehow they did something wrong just by living where they did. And now the money and the sympathy are drying up. People just don’t understand. You have to see it, smell it, put on a white mask and a pair of plastic gloves, and walk into a world where nothing is salvageable, not even the mildewed wedding pictures. | |
