Katrina, five years later

I can’t be the only one who had nightmares.

Five years ago this weekend, Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast, devastating cities and towns in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. The natural disaster was bad enough. But what haunted me and other Americans was the man-made disaster, particularly in New Orleans.

And I’m not just talking about the federal response and the scapegoated “heckuva job, Brownie” FEMA head Mike Brown. New Orleans is and long has been a deeply dysfunctional place, socially and with respect to its government. It’s a city where doctors and nurses in places like Charity Hospital tended patients with no electricity and 100+ degree heat. It’s a city where Charity Hospital, not to mention the public housing, still hasn’t reopened five years later.

I visited New Orleans in March. I bought a newspaper one day, and four out of five front-page stories had something to do with Katrina – five years later. We were building a house for a family outside the city who’s still living in a FEMA trailer – five years later. When you drive past the Lower Ninth Ward at night, the lights from rebuilt houses are few and far between – five years later.

Yes, it’s beautiful, and yes, it’s like no other place in America. It’s home to an astonishing, fragile culture that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world, much of it lovingly tended by the black population. But I found it to be pretty depressing, frankly. If another Katrina hit this time next week, I have a feeling people would still be drowning in their attics.

New Orleans is a contradiction. A city so laissez-faire that you can walk around in public with an open container of liquor in the middle of the day, but where the government seems to get in the way more than it helps. A city that sells itself on its jazz culture, which is largely sustained by the same poor blacks that New Orleans now seems hell-bent on keeping out.

More than anything, Katrina was a symbol of government ineptitude. We put a man on the moon back when computers still took up a room, we developed the atomic bomb in a year, but in 2005 we couldn’t get water to the Superdome. Our country’s current frustration with and skepticism of government may have tipped because of the financial crisis, but I think it might have started with Katrina.

For people who care to look beyond the “Bush doesn’t care about black people” rhetoric, the implications are even worse. New Orleans was the victim of bad public policy – local, state and federal – for years before Katrina. For most of the 20th century, the city constructed canals to keep the Port of New Orleans viable, including the 76-mile-long MR-GO that channeled Katrina’s storm surge right into the middle of the city (it was closed last year).

What this says to me is that the people in the government aren’t always right. It’s our responsibility as citizens to question their motivations and their judgment, taking a long view that isn’t concerned with the next election cycle. You can’t blithely ignore the public arena until it’s time for the government to help you out.

New Orleans elected a new mayor this year – Mitch Landrieu – who says his top priority is restoring public faith in the police department. The Justice Department is finally getting around to investigating some of the NOPD’s alleged abuses, including post-Katrina murders. The cops involved in the Danziger Bridge shootings are facing trial. Five years later.

It’s axiomatic that life moves slower in the Big Easy. But maybe it’s time for the tempo to pick up a bit.