Building Anew
Jack Shafer makes a case for not rebuilding New Orleans:
And according to an AP poll today, 54 percent of Americans agree with him that the parts of the city that flooded should be abandoned. The statistics are unarguable, of course. Which is exactly why I say, "rebuild it." Right there. Not the same, but better.
Not for the sake of New Orleans' cultural treasures. As Shafer points out, those will endure. The city could survive as an enclave for the very rich and tourists, much as Venice has. But I wish to see the whole city of half a million brought back to life precisely for the sake of curing the failures Shafer lists above. Because the calamity America keeps revisiting is not a hurricane or an earthquake or a financial collapse or a terrorist attack. It's poverty in a land of affluence.
That is our first and enduring national agon. We are a land of people striving for material success, and there will always be losers in that game. At the same time, we are a people of deep spiritual sensbility, and our faiths forbid us to leave the poor to suffer.
Frankly, we have never really worked out that balance. Poverty, increasingly for the last 100 years in America, has been urban, poorly educated, and black. As Shafer notes, almost nowhere did those downhill tracks converge more pitiably than in the run-down parishes of New Orleans.
It is time to rise up and be the Americans again, the people we tell ourselves we are in the national stories we treasure. The people Whitman and Sandburg told us we were. The ones who can stare down devils and build shining cities out of waste and wilderness. Time to finish the job. Perhaps this generation can find greatness after all.
Europeans have another view of us, that they mutter to one another: "You can count on America to do the right thing -- after they've tried everything else." There's bitter truth in that, too. We tried to order race relations with slavery and black codes. We tried to break down barriers with with Reconstruction and the Great Society. Jefferson tried and Lincoln tried and Truman tried.
In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. offered us a choice: "chaos or community." What have we done since then? We've been stalled on the edge of the Civil Rights dream for more than 30 years now. Busing was a deadly wrong turn. The economic advance of blacks in the last three decades has been real and measurable, but it's painfully slow, and frankly very few in America are getting ahead as fast as we did in the 1950s and '60s. Too many black folks are left behind, in places like New Orleans. Furthermore, too much of black popular culture (nurtured by all races) rejects conventional success, celebrates thuggery, and suggests whites are responsible for all black problems. About half of whites tell pollsters "blacks could do better if they tried harder." What would King make of our fetish for "diversity" and "multiculturalism"? He dreamed of integration of hearts and minds as well as bodies.
The cataclysm in New Orleans brought it all in focus. The failure of the governments at every level left the people to shift for themselves. Those with means got out. Those without often sat and waited for someone with power to help them.
Rebuild it. It will be messy, unglamorous. Give the people of the city the tools to do the job, but don't do the work for them -- let them decide how and where to build. Keep the bureaucrats at a distance. Find real leaders, the Giulianis and Honores, in the situation and let them take the lead. Involve everyone. Build out the old flaws, build in new and better patterns of living. So the people who move back there know this is their place, made and owned by them.
And while you build a new city, build something else, too. The Civil Rights Movement tore down the old Jim Crow South. When you've torn down something decrepit and dangerous, you've only done half the job. You have to replace it with something better.
Government can't pass laws to force people to sit down and get along. The people must do that, one by one, as individuals, not as demographic blocs, not as census statistical brackets. They go to school together and they work together and they meet in public places and hash out respect for one another amid their differences. It happens on the level of a neighborhood -- the 5,000 or so people who live within walking distance of some public swimming pool or library.
To not build -- to fail to build -- again the city left us as a legacy of two centuries would be worse than letting the World Trade Center blocks stand an empty hole. To fail to build again in Manhattan would teach our enemies to think we were beaten, whether we are or not. To abandon the city of New Orleans would teach our children it's not worth it. America's not worth it. Not there, not anywhere.
The city's romance is not the reality for most who live there. It's a poor place, with about 27 percent of the population of 484,000 living under the poverty line, and it's a black place, where 67 percent are African-American. In 65 percent of families living in poverty, no husband is present. ... New Orleans' public schools, which are 93 percent black, have failed their citizens. The state of Louisiana rates 47 percent of New Orleans schools as "Academically Unacceptable" and another 26 percent are under "Academic Warning." About 25 percent of adults have no high-school diploma.
And according to an AP poll today, 54 percent of Americans agree with him that the parts of the city that flooded should be abandoned. The statistics are unarguable, of course. Which is exactly why I say, "rebuild it." Right there. Not the same, but better.
Not for the sake of New Orleans' cultural treasures. As Shafer points out, those will endure. The city could survive as an enclave for the very rich and tourists, much as Venice has. But I wish to see the whole city of half a million brought back to life precisely for the sake of curing the failures Shafer lists above. Because the calamity America keeps revisiting is not a hurricane or an earthquake or a financial collapse or a terrorist attack. It's poverty in a land of affluence.
That is our first and enduring national agon. We are a land of people striving for material success, and there will always be losers in that game. At the same time, we are a people of deep spiritual sensbility, and our faiths forbid us to leave the poor to suffer.
Frankly, we have never really worked out that balance. Poverty, increasingly for the last 100 years in America, has been urban, poorly educated, and black. As Shafer notes, almost nowhere did those downhill tracks converge more pitiably than in the run-down parishes of New Orleans.
It is time to rise up and be the Americans again, the people we tell ourselves we are in the national stories we treasure. The people Whitman and Sandburg told us we were. The ones who can stare down devils and build shining cities out of waste and wilderness. Time to finish the job. Perhaps this generation can find greatness after all.
Europeans have another view of us, that they mutter to one another: "You can count on America to do the right thing -- after they've tried everything else." There's bitter truth in that, too. We tried to order race relations with slavery and black codes. We tried to break down barriers with with Reconstruction and the Great Society. Jefferson tried and Lincoln tried and Truman tried.
In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. offered us a choice: "chaos or community." What have we done since then? We've been stalled on the edge of the Civil Rights dream for more than 30 years now. Busing was a deadly wrong turn. The economic advance of blacks in the last three decades has been real and measurable, but it's painfully slow, and frankly very few in America are getting ahead as fast as we did in the 1950s and '60s. Too many black folks are left behind, in places like New Orleans. Furthermore, too much of black popular culture (nurtured by all races) rejects conventional success, celebrates thuggery, and suggests whites are responsible for all black problems. About half of whites tell pollsters "blacks could do better if they tried harder." What would King make of our fetish for "diversity" and "multiculturalism"? He dreamed of integration of hearts and minds as well as bodies.
The cataclysm in New Orleans brought it all in focus. The failure of the governments at every level left the people to shift for themselves. Those with means got out. Those without often sat and waited for someone with power to help them.
Rebuild it. It will be messy, unglamorous. Give the people of the city the tools to do the job, but don't do the work for them -- let them decide how and where to build. Keep the bureaucrats at a distance. Find real leaders, the Giulianis and Honores, in the situation and let them take the lead. Involve everyone. Build out the old flaws, build in new and better patterns of living. So the people who move back there know this is their place, made and owned by them.
And while you build a new city, build something else, too. The Civil Rights Movement tore down the old Jim Crow South. When you've torn down something decrepit and dangerous, you've only done half the job. You have to replace it with something better.
Government can't pass laws to force people to sit down and get along. The people must do that, one by one, as individuals, not as demographic blocs, not as census statistical brackets. They go to school together and they work together and they meet in public places and hash out respect for one another amid their differences. It happens on the level of a neighborhood -- the 5,000 or so people who live within walking distance of some public swimming pool or library.
To not build -- to fail to build -- again the city left us as a legacy of two centuries would be worse than letting the World Trade Center blocks stand an empty hole. To fail to build again in Manhattan would teach our enemies to think we were beaten, whether we are or not. To abandon the city of New Orleans would teach our children it's not worth it. America's not worth it. Not there, not anywhere.
