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New Orleans is an evolving petri dish of what America might be to save its soul.  Has the city come back; yes and no.  There are parts that are just fucking gone, obliterated culturally that just died and that happens, maybe not as abruptly as a storm, but that is culture, that’s life. 

The gentrification is a mixed blessing in my eyes.  The city is shit poor.  The city benefited from a flush of insurance money in the time when the rest of the country was going through a huge recession from 2006 to 2009.  A lot of people made out better getting insurance proceeds from a financial stand point.  A lot of people got fucked over by the insurance companies and their entire neighborhoods died or came back as some mutant.  You had patchwork zombie trailer parks in front yards.  Uncertainties of who was coming back and not. 

The biggest thing is that the people who are in New Orleans post K really want to be in New Orleans.  The passion the unification of all that brought most people together.  We still have huge crime problems as a state and city, but the reality of crime in the U.S. is that it is at historic lows.  That is not because we lock everyone up and the over-crimilization of basic acts, I think it is just people communicate more through daily life and ignorance is diminishing as time progresses.  The crimes that do occur are just over advertised compared to before where there is cognitive dissonance of how things use to be and how they are now.  New Orleans has a lot of that with Katrina.  People have funny memories as if older is always better, which in my opinion I have a very low nostalgia threshold.  Shit has to change.  It is the nature of the universe. 

Personally I think Katrina was a giant muscle exercise for the city.  We are capable of more, of savoring the flavor more of culture, art, and music.  I think the world sees that in part because of some of the film tax credits the state put out which created shows like Treme. 

The ten year anniversary is something around here I think a lot of people don’t want to dwell on.  It fucking sucked.  It changed my whole fucking life.  I got in a van with my one year old daughter my wife and left a house with everything we could pack on a Friday evening after work and that house, that life was never to be had again.  I went through living with in laws in some small town, to Dallas, to back to that town.  I in no small way do not think that if that storm never happens I might not have gotten divorced.  I also would not be as tested and resolute as I am or learned a lot of hard but amazing life lessons. 

I think for a lot of people that is what Katrina was.  Are we glad it happened; no, but you see the good in it.  You see Biloxi Mississippi and realize the eye of the storm didn’t even hit New Orleans.  The levees didn’t break until Monday.  The storm had passed and there was no water on Canal Street. Then something the government built failed.  It is a different level of anger with a natural event.  Our governor a Democrat at the time got in some pissing match with W and no troops came down for days.  People were dead and had no water or supplies in a U.S. city.  Nobody could communicate.  Texting was not ubiquitous like it is now.  Cell phones didn’t work.  I remember driving down the interstate from Vicksburg Mississippi to where my ex wife’s family lived contemplating getting out and walking down the interstate with my one year old daughter and just leaving all our stuff to try to make it to a place with air conditioning for our kid. 

It was late August in New Orleans which is hot as hell.  My boss committed suicide.  Just so much.