Continue Your Education

I started to feel like a jerk for my rosy outlook and posting on New Orleans until I saw Mayor Cory Booker of Newark last night. Booker talked about being dragged into the middle of a desperate neighborhood and being asked by a longtime resident “What do you see?” “A crackhouse, a project, drug dealers,” he replied. “Then you can’t do anything for me,” she said. “If that’s all you see, you have no vision and you cannot help me.” I suppose I saw beyond the spray painted homes indicating that the house had been searched and other signs of disaster to see the vitality and promise of New Orleans 2.0, and perhaps that’s not such a bad or naive thing.

He also asked where the “moral outrage” was in Newark, and presumably New Orleans, Rio and any other place plagued by outrageous violence. This morning I received a petition to send to congress and the president asking for an “independent bipartisan investigation into the failure of the Federal Levees on August 29, 2005 that flooded 80% of New Orleans and the surrounding region including St. Bernard, Jefferson, Orleans, St. Charles and Plaquemines Parishes.” A petition may not be the most extreme embodiment of outrage, but it represents a commitment to “Defend New Orleans” (as the T-shirts implore). Sign it at www.levees.org/campaigns.