A higher view of New Orleans

Fortunately, it is not often that a city is expected to make an argument for its very existence.

When it happens, however, as it has in New Orleans, there are a number of ways to make the case. Economic, strategic, historic, and logistic arguments are all being made. Some reduce this city's value simply to tourist appreciation. But surprisingly, perhaps because people are reaching for more than just another cost-benefit analysis, some of the most significant questions regarding New Orleans "p-K," (post-Katrina) are spiritual.

We are not quite ready to do without the port, the offshore and on-shore oil rigs, the ship building, the centralized location to sort the nation's mail, the abundance of seafood, and the ambience that created jazz and blues, but perhaps we could adjust.

What we should fear, and fear is not too strong a term, is that if we define this experience by what has happened and should happen to the city's infrastructure, we might skirt the larger and more pivotal issue of what has happened and should happen in people's hearts.

In a city teeming with imported workers, there's no need to ask who is a New Orleanian. These days, New Orleanians share a haunted look, a distracted manner. Storm destruction is everywhere. Daily life can be dauntingly inconvenient, and we might as well all be wearing rubberized bracelets reading "Your Future Here Is Uncertain." But these sights are not the most important of what's going on in New Orleans.

What's going on in New Orleans is that people who love to fill our homes with the smell of red beans and rice, done just right, do not have homes, have no place to cook, and are tired of "eating in the street," but are glad to find whatever they can.

What's going on in New Orleans is a new realization that the sense of peace you have when you arrive home at night is built as much on your neighbor's light being on as your own, that the folks-down-the-block's kids are doing homework, and that although you don't want anything from the bakery, it's there if you should change your mind. People working, relaxing, arguing, planning, talking, and sleeping all around you mean peace, and when this normalcy is not there, not for miles in any direction, this is heartbreak.

If asked to identify a difference between the United States of 40 years ago and the United States of today, it could be reasonably said that our inability to face human truths, universal truths, has played a major role in our descent from higher ground. Part of the agenda of the civil rights movement was denying people the luxury of pretending that other people's pain did not hurt. But like first-graders anxious for recess, our attention to this agenda has strayed, amid fascination with the shiny objects of consumer goods. And we have elected and reelected politicians who do not serve the people, we've marred the environment and we've abused prisoners of war abroad.

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