Billy Sothern: New Orleans Is Us

It has become clear that government maladministration--spawned by disinvestment in public goods by successive fiscally conservative administrations hostile to the notion of government--caused the collapse of the levees that were supposed to protect the city. And as passionately as New Orleanians want our city to recover, we are not up to repairing the levees ourselves, or restoring the wetlands, or moving thousands of families from flood-prone land drained by the Army Corps of Engineers at public expense for the benefit of development companies. These matters go far beyond the capacity of the rugged individuals who are New Orleans's returned citizens.

But what is even more troubling than our government's failure to address the causes and consequences of the breach of our levees is the cynical government inaction that allowed the horrors that the storm exposed--sickening urban poverty and despair--to entrench themselves in New Orleans.

On this score, even if your town is built safely on the most solid rocks, you should be worried too. Because for all of New Orleans's exceptionality, Americans don't need to travel to the city to see its worst aspects. Instead, they can walk out their doors and find the closest neighborhood with failing public schools, staggering levels of violence on the streets, crumbling housing and low life expectancy. They may not hear jazz music or see rows of shotgun houses, but they will have found New Orleans, more or less--or at least the New Orleans that we all must confront if we are to live in a country that even closely approximates our ideals.

In this way, New Orleans is a bellwether for American democracy--a canary in a coal mine--not because of what makes us culturally or geographically unique but because of what makes us exemplary.

More here: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070910/sothern