New Orleans, Still a Forgotten City

New Orleans -- Walking around the French Quarter last month, you could be fooled into thinking that Hurricane Katrina was a momentary anomaly, something that happened and was forgotten about. Canal Street is seemingly bustling downtown, and turning off onto Bourbon Street, the party goes until 5 a.m.

Wow! Everything's fine... if you're a tourist. But take a bus up to the Lower Ninth Ward and you'll be relieved of your traveler's naivete' as well as your belief in American equality.

The bungalow in the photo above is just an example of what the whole area looks like, four years after the flooding that resulted from the broken levees just after Katrina struck. Much of this place has been forgotten, whitewashed with a new presidency that has yet to directly address getting the infrastructure here put back in place.

To be fair, though, the last administration just said "let them eat cake." ...

http://xml.channel.aol.com/xmlpublisher/fetch.v2.xml?option=expand_relative_urls&dataUrlNodes=uiConfig,feedConfig,entry&id=699910&pid=699909&uts=1251129835

http://cdn.channel.aol.com/cs_feed_v1_6/csfeedwrapper.swf

Remembering Hurricane Katrina

This collection of images shows the devastation faced by the people of the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which struck on Aug. 29, 2005.

solentnews.biz

BlackVoices.com

Katrina - Before and After

Cars travel over a bridge crossing the Industrial Canal to the Lower Ninth Ward July 18, 2006, in New Orleans. A year earlier, two men paddle in high water. (Mario Tama, Getty Images)

Residents walk through floodwaters on Canal Street in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. A lone street car waits a year later. (Bill Haber, AP)

Hurricane Katrina evacuee Kimi Seymour, takes a break along Interstate 10 as she walked along the highway with a shopping cart of possessions after Katrina. (Irwin Thompson, The Dallas Morning News / AP)

Residents inspect damage left by Hurricane Katrina in Biloxi, Miss. (Robert Sullivan, AFP / Getty Images)

Rhonda Braden walks through the destruction in her childhood neighborhood, Aug. 31, 2005 in Long Beach, Miss. (Rob Carr, AP)

Katrina victims carry merchandise from downtown businesses in New Orleans. (Eric Gay, AP)

A woman and her child wait with hundreds of other flood victims at the convention center in New Orleans. (Eric Gay, AP)

People walk along Interstate 10 near the Louisiana Superdome early on Aug. 31, 2005, in New Orleans and a year later traffic flows down the same road. (Melanie Burford, AP)

The destroyed Hyatt Regency hotel, left, is shown next to a statue in New Orleans and the way it appeared a year later. (Mario Tama, Getty Images)

Young Tanisha Belvin holds the hand of fellow Hurricane Katrina survivor Nita LaGarde. (Eric Gay, AP)

The residential streets around here had once been instant waterways during the flooding. But the waters are gone and instead, there are desolate looking streets, quiet and eerie. Some empty houses still stand, some have collapsed in on themselves either during the flood, or sometime in the years after.

Empty lots are replaced by tall grass, packs of feral dogs can still be seen, there's even a staircase sitting there with no house.

For More Katrina Anniversary Coverage Click on the Graphic Below

But the thing that strikes you most is the people. You know, the ones Kanye West said George Bush didn't care about? Actually they're mostly black, but not all black and George Bush didn't care about any of them. It's funny how tragedy has a way of erasing racial boundaries, if there were any to start.

Anyway, if you go to the neighborhood, they don't mind telling you what's happening. They don't mind telling you about their pain, about the neglect that frankly never would have happened in San Francisco or Boston. I walked up to a group of guys, it was 97-degree weather, and I asked a stupid question: how could this have happened?

They had to laugh to keep from crying.

To be fair, the area was never Peyton Place. There had always been a high crime rate there, and that hasn't changed despite the drop in population. But for those folks it was home, hood, flood, whatever.

"The waters got up to the upstairs windows," one told me. "It wasn't the storm that did it. The hurricane came and went. The next morning was sunny, clear. But all of a sudden, water started pouring in from the Industrial Canal. Before I knew it I was damn near drowning."

The brother told the story as vividly as if it had happened yesterday and in a way it did, because since September, 2005, time has stood still here. The flood of water has been replaced with a flood of beauracracy, FEMA paperwork needing to be filled out, money running out for state aid. And that little thing called the recession, well, it's hard to tell if that's being felt around here because while the rest of the country was doing moderately well, there was no place for NOLA to go but up.

So what's the solution? What do we do? Really this isn't the first area America has let turn into a Third World country. So should we wait on President Obama to make the fix? That's a tough one. Not that New Orleanians are sorrow cases, quite far from it, and they are as resilient as anyone in our history. But the area still needs emergency aid, humanitarian aid and needs structuring and investment. But more than anything else, it needs its people to keep talking. Keep telling the story to people like me who wander around looking for the truth.

Even a truth I wasn't prepared to hear.