The Times Picayune, the paper of record for me growing up in the New Orleans area, has gone to an online edition-only today. In an article just posted titled, “Will New Orleans Survive?”, writer James Varney says:
On the southern fringe of New Orleans’ City Park there is a live oak with a branch that dips low, goes briefly underground, and comes up the other side still thriving.
It’s ancient and gnarled, this tree, and filtered sunglight slants through its crown at dusk. It’s a sublime thing.
When we talk about these majestic items that dot New Orleans’ landscape we say, “is,” but we may mean, “was.” The reports are still scattered, the news from the ground still incomplete, but Hurricane Katrina may have annihilated New Orleans.
It looks bad to everyone. “It’s impossible for us to say how many structures can be salvaged,” Gov. Kathleen Blanco said late Tuesday. But can the birthplace of jazz truly be wiped from the face of the earth?
New Orleans may yet surprise. Too often the city is written off as a whiskey nirvana, where one guzzles Pimms cups at Napoleon House in the French Quarter at night, and eggs and grits at the Camellia Grill in the Riverbend at sunrise.
The rest of the article is good reading because it touches on a lot of reasons why I’m pretty sure the city will surprise again int he face of Katrina’s devastation. People and the cities they inhabit are remarkably resilient. When faced with insurmountable tasks, people, in general, will find a way over, around or through.
The very history of south Louisiana — and New Orleans in particular — is a testament to surviving.
It’s events like this that remind people they are people first, Orleanians second, and skin color somewhere down the line. Substitute another city for New Orleans and I believe the same could be said for any other city under such dire conditions.
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