New Orleans, one year later, is still a ghost town

Last year, there was so much blogging about Katrina, I thought that the best thing I could do was create a large linkfest of everyone else's posts. That is what I did - check it out here, a nice one-stop-shopping for the analysis and opinion at the time. If you need to refresh your memory that is the place to go. You can also find most of the iconic images collected in one place here.

But I did not entirely abstain from commenting myself, though I was trying to look for angles nobody else covered and news nobody else had - which was hard to find at that time. So, I blogged about how animals fared in the hurricane, especially horses.

I wrote about the refusal to take an offer of aid from Cuba and how free market killed NoLa.

I think I was the very first to blog about Kanye West and what he said on TV (as I was watching as it happened). I was also one of the first to report when Brownie was fired (or resigned).

I found four separate timelines. The frame of a looting mob was recognized and attacked early. And there were touching (and telling!) survivor stories that needed a wider audience.

There was humor.There was inside-the-Beltline politics.

I looked for what other people said at the time, including Lakoff, Kerry, Edwards and some others (and recognized early that the events may favour Edwards for 2008).

And there was much, much more.

I wrote two less newsy and more opinionated posts - Stop Beating on Bush! and We The People and upon re-readng them a year later, I still agree with every word in them.

Finally, when I wrote this - Ghost Town - many people scolded me for being so pessimistic. It turns out, I was right. New Orleans has still not recovered its population.

A large chunk of that population is not back yet. Some plan to come back, a year later, but still do not have a place to live. Others have assimilated in other places. The magic of living in New Orleans is dwarfed by the reality of survival.

The place has not been fixed yet. The dams are not built to sustain another hurricane of that size. The wetlands have not been restored. The big river is still fighting to change its course.

And the locals are still fighting over the urban project for the city: some have a vision of Disneyfied, white, upper-middle-class New Orleans; others react by insisting on restoring the city exactly as it was, warts and all, good and bad, shacks and slums and everything else. Voices of moderation and smart urban planning are overpowered by emotionally-charged voices of the two extremes. It is unfortunate that I was right. I wish I wasn't.