14 years ago

As streets became rivers just over a week ago, thoughts turned to nearly fourteen years before.

It did not matter that some of the worst street flooding came from sliver-by-the-river neighborhoods that were mostly spared Katrina’s wrath. The memories, the tragedies, reflected in the oily water.

Experts say that the death toll amounted to a bit less than 4,000, yet how many grandparents and friends, relatives and acquaintances, ultimately expired as they could not access medication or doctors — or live with heartbreak of exile and their loss of their place? Tens of thousands undoubtedly.

In the aftermath, our city did finally face many of its endemic problems, long brushed under the proverbial rug of urban decay. While many of these post-Storm reforms ranged from imperfect to impermanent, a new civic spirit to fight back emerged out of a fear that “green dots” would replace what little had survived the breaking of the floodwalls at the 17th Street and London Avenue canals.

New energy entered the Crescent City amidst the tears. With one collective voice, we screamed that New Orleans would not go gently into the night. We chose life over oblivion, and a generation of children grew up in that spirit – for a while.

They knew nothing of the months and years of exile, and those who never returned. To the young, the empty tracts of land seemed part of the landscape, not evidence that more than a decade later the scars of the Great Storm remained. As time passed, a peculiar normalcy descended upon us. The adult survivors buried their PTSD; the children raised in the wreckage raged and then calmed (or did not); and the babies who grew into teenagers were spared the memory of both tragedy and the heights of culture the citizenry took for granted before August 2005.

Slowly, complacency crept into our post-apocalyptic zeal for reform. It proved different than the pre-Katrina lackadaisical joy amidst the crime and decay. Fatigue tempered “the City that Care Forgot.” The “Big Easy” became the “largely exhausted.”

Nevertheless, life moves on, and children give us new joy. They become our hope. As we watch the streets flood once more, and then proceed to nervously track Hurricane Dorian’s path, our latent fears turn to prayers. “Please God, let them not endure the struggles we knew in the wake of Katrina.”

When hurricane season ends, it is for these children that we must find the energy for reform once more. For when we enter our whitened sepulchers, we die knowing the wonderful spirit of New Orleans stands as our only true inheritance. We must leave this legacy as joyful — and as hopeful — for our descendants as we received from our forbearers.

And perhaps, if the resolution of restoration found after the storm remains with us, even better.

This article originally published in the September 2, 2019 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.