« Liveblogging 1% | Main | RT II: Brilliance vs. douchebaggery »
August 25, 2007
LA Times: After Katrina, hope and despair coexist
Hope and despair coexist in the city, within each neighborhood, and probably within every single person. I know I'm not the only one that has had moments of seeing something totally kickass and wonderful, and then a week later waking up in the middle of the night thinking "what the hell am I doing here?"
Stan emailed me a link to a new LA Times piece on Katrina, two years later. It gets the tenor of things pretty much exactly right. Where there is hope, it is due to people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps or with the help of volunteers and non-profits. Where there is despair, it is due to the slow pace of progress, and the feeling that government at all levels is either ineffective or downright hostile to progress.
Two years after their city was nearly annihilated by a levee failure, the residents of this middle-class New Orleans neighborhood acknowledged that their surroundings still looked pretty bad. But they also insisted that things were slowly getting better. Just 31% of Gentilly's 16,000 addresses were reoccupied or renovated as of March, according to a survey by a Dartmouth professor -- but an additional 57% were finally being fixed up.Private citizens, not the government, deserved the credit, they said -- a source of grim humor among those laboring to mend the neighborhood.
"Of course, we should also thank George Bush, Kathleen Blanco and Ray Nagin," resident Robert Counce said sarcastically of the president, the governor and the mayor as the meeting wrapped up.
Posted by ray at August 25, 2007 1:17 PM | Permalink
Categories: [katrina | new orleans ]
Comments
Post a comment