The story has dropped off the radar for most people, but New Orleans is not coming back (at least not quickly enough, even if parts of the city now have power and the streets have been cleared) and not getting the vital aid and protection that was promised. Many people who were supportive during the immediate aftermath do not realize what dire shape the city is still in, and that the city's cultural, economic and physical survival depends on people putting pressure on the government to rebuild the levees and help fund an economic and residential comeback.

We can bail out multibillion dollar corporations and third world countries, why not one of our own cities? It is sickening. Meanwhile the uninformed and the right-wing continue to spread lies about New Orleans: that we're spending levee money on Mardi Gras, that the levees failed through no fault of the Army Corps of Engineers, that there is no connection between global warming and hurricanes, that New Orleans is so corrupt that it's impossible to get money directed to effective projects, and the worst lie of all, perhaps, that the city has already come back and doesn't need help as desperately as before.

All you have to do is take a drive through the Lower 9th Ward (which is so destroyed, it looks with no exaggeration, like an atomic bomb has dropped on it) and many other devastated areas in New Orleans, and see for yourself a city that continues to lie in ruins, the majority of its population still in exile, shops closing down weeks after trying to revive themselves, the City completely bankrupted by the disaster and able to only make slight gestures at recovery.

Perhaps most disgustingly, New Orleans is being asked to justify its existence by some of the right wing talking heads. As if any city in Texas or California or New York would ever be. Anyone with even part of a heart that has ever spent any time in New Orleans knows why it must be preserved. But others argue to allow a city that is almost an entire historic zone, without question the most interesting and unique city in the country, birthplace of Jazz and one of the most important ports, to simply wither and die.

What they resent, I am guessing is not the flood dangers, but the uniqueness and freedom that exists in New Orleans. New Orleans does not conform to the ideological blueprint that the current Administration and Congress have and they see this as an opportunity. Please if you have any civic influence at all--as theoretically as a citizen in a democracy we all do--let your government know that New Orleans needs the help of the entire country before it's too late.

Mercibeaucoupd'etat,
chef menteur Jim Yonkus and Sheana Davis