NEW ORLEANS REVISITED

On PBS recently, Jeffrey Brown interviewed Kenneth Feinberg. Louisana has received over 700 billion from the Fund BP set up. Why didn't they do something like this after Katrina? I can still remember those sad days of Katrina five years ago. I kept thinking: what is wrong with us!!! Send in the 82d Airborne. Later on, we discovered what was wrong: incompetence, hesitancy, simply a government's failure to act.

My first trip to New Orleans was as a college student in the ROTC' s (Reserve Officers Training Corp), Pershing Rifles, a drill team. I wasn't much interested in the military but I surely was in New Orleans and the Mardi Gras. I've visited NO dozens of times since but like most, just hit the French Quarter.

Katrina's impact on New Orleans has been analyzed, dissected, microscoped in every possible way. In an NBC segment, Brien Williams revisited many he had followed from five years before. How were they? Little had changed with those tragic faces we'd seen five years earlier. The French Quarter, most everywhere frequented by the tourists and shoppers and the Mardi Gras crowd seemed back. All but the infamous 9th ward.

Beyond comprehension is the sober reality as we still see the disenfranchised who are the poor, the old, the uneducated, and the sick and who just happen to be mostly minorities. THE MORE THINGS CHANGE, THE MORE THEY REMAIN THE SAME. Fault? Blame? Damn if I know.

But, in pondering all of it on the not so happy recent anniversary and now the BP oil spill, I think New Orleans may be a microcosm of any large city in America: pockets of poverty, ignorance, minorities disenfranchised. What is sad is that after five years, we can't point to a city like New Orleans and say, "See what we've done. We have rebuilt, poverty has been eradicated, there are few to no disenfranchised, adinfinitum." I hope I'm wrong but for a showcase city in what can be done, it looks to me like we've dropped the ball again.