Not dead yet

[redbird]

Yes, I'm worried about Hurricane Katrina and what it may do to New Orleans, but it's discouraging and odd to be reading all these posts that seem to be coming from a future in which the city is completely gone.

Cities can recover from a lot, but it helps to believe in them.

Comments

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

As far as I'm concerned, you and the other posts are both wrong. Believeing or not believing is not going to make a whit of difference in terms of what's going to happen.

[redbird]

Belief won't affect how hard Katrina hurts, I know that. It will affect what people do once the storm is over: rebuild what's damaged, or move away.

[brooksmoses]

The reason that we currently have a Galveston, Texas has nothing to do with the fact that it got a lucky break instead of getting destroyed by a hurricane in 1900 (it actually did get destroyed by a hurricane in 1900), and everything to do with the choices that people made, based on beliefs about what was going to happen to their city, once the hurricane was over.

The same is very likely to be true of New Orleans.

And this is why the beliefs will make quite a lot of difference in terms of what's going to happen.

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

But that belief doesn't matter right now; it matters afterwards. And the belief of the people wringing their hands from far away matters less than the belief of the people being evacuated right now and hence are not online.

I lived in San Francisco, and before that in Chicago; I am more than passing familiar with cities that recover from major disasters, and the vision and tenacity that contributed to their recovery. I was with Vicki up until her last sentence. It's not belief we need now. Belief is irrelevant right now. Belief can wait.

[brooksmoses]

So, equally, can belief in the city's destruction wait.

In the meantime, what we believe now will color how we interpret the facts to come, and what we believe about their import in the future.

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

Yes, all the hand-wringing and chin-bucking can equally wait.

In the meantime, I will let the people whose future is directly affected by Hurrican Katrina have the stage.

[redbird]

None of the comments I was reacting to were from New Orleans, or other Gulf Coast, residents talking about their situation. They were random "Goodbye New Orleans" and similar from people who wish they'd had the chance to visit, or fear they won't get to visit again.

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

I was aware of this, and I did not mean to imply they were.

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

I think that people are already mourning what they wanted to see, as tourists, mostly the French Quarter, (which faces real damage, but will survive on several levels). New Orleans will recover, but it will have changed, like parts of the Bay Area did after the Loma Prieta quake, and like we will after a similar-sized quake that is underneath us instead of 60 miles away.

[orangemike.livejournal.com]

I agree. People seem to be obsessing on scenarios that give the me impression they derive from past reading of Ballard's Drowned World.

No matter what I think about the city, or indeed the entire coastal region, there is a lot of resilience in the human spirit, and it will bounce back.

[coyotegoth.livejournal.com]

Well said; that's very true.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Just to note that how people think about what may happen to New Orleans will affect what they do after the hurricane, but I'm also concerned about what premature despair does to the people who feel it.

[miwasatoshi.livejournal.com]

Remember, there is still a Hiroshima, and we did *that* to ourselves.

And the human race was quite possibly bottlenecked down to the hundreds by the Toba eruption ... but we survived that.

New Orleans will survive this. It'll just ... suck for a while. :/