KATRINA WILL SAVE NEW ORLEANS Reflections on the good that could come from Katrina by Royal Masset

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I believe New Orleans will become a great city again because of Katrina. It has not been a great city for some time and was in decline long before Katrina. Its public persona as the quirky "Big Easy" city with Mardi Gras, Jazz, Cajun food and Bourbon Street has kept it alive as a great city for tourism and conventions. But this party face masked the fact that this was a deteriorating and dysfunctional city.

I mean no disrespect with the title I chose. I wish Katrina never happened. For those who lost homes and family members this tragedy will bring sadness for the rest of their lives. It is economically devastating. In an attempt to say something positive about this disaster I hope I am not being grossly insensitive.

New Orleans was the Murder Capitol of the USA. For every 100,000 residents New Orleans had 58 murders in 2003. Washington was second with 44 and Detroit 3rd with 39. Even Los Angeles only had 13 murders. By comparison San Antonio had 7 murders per 100,000 population, McAllen 5, Austin and El Paso 4. Midland has 2 and Mesquite less than 1. Every tourist I know, who went to New Orleans recently, remarked on its seediness and sense of danger.

I have no doubt that New Orleans will not only rise again, it will prosper and thrive. It is unique among all American cities. The great flood of 2005 will become part of a legacy of iconic greatness going back to the 1815 battle of New Orleans.

The Future of New Orleans

Dire predictions say New Orleans will require 6 to 9 months to have the water pumped out and before people can return. They are wrong. Most of the French Quarter, the central business district, infrastructure, and sports venues are dry and intact. They will be operational within weeks. I believe that even the floodwaters will be cleared out in 30 days rather than the 80 now being most authoritatively touted. The big news will be how fast we are rebuilding New Orleans, far faster than expected.

I fully expect tourism to return to the French Quarter by next month. Next February’s 2006 Madis Gras will celebrate New Orleans’ march back to greatness.

The flip side of this is that though the symbol of "New Orleans" will be saved and prosper some of its neighborhoods won’t be rebuilt. Refugees with new homes and jobs will not want to return to an uncertain future. And while public opinion strongly supports rebuilding New Orleans, it will not be enthusiastic about rebuilding demolished neighborhoods under sea level, which would be very cruel. They will heed Albert Einstein’s observation that "insanity is doing the same thing over again and expecting a different result."

Great Disasters impact history.

Disasters make things happen. Our daily routines and thinking are altered. We question things. And we take action. We are motivated to avoid the next disaster and to live in a world that has learned from the last one. Here are some examples of disasters that have changed history:

The Galveston flood caused Houston to become the greatest American Shipping port. It also ushered in the Council-Manager form of government that cleaned up corruption in many American cities. Houston will benefit from Katrina almost as much as it did from the Galveston Hurricane of 1900.

The impact of the Great Chicago Fire is summarized at prairieghosts.com this way: "It soared from the ashes like the phoenix and became the home of the first skyscraper in 1885, then passed the one million mark in population five years later. The Great Chicago Fire was the beginning of a new metropolis, much greater than it could have ever become if the horrific fire had never happened"

David McCullough, in "The Path Between the Seas" has no doubt that a volcanic eruption caused the US government to abandon a done deal to build a canal in Nicaragua. This event was also the birth of the first modern lobbyists, Cromwell and Bunau-Varilla, who tried to get the US to pay billions of (current) dollars to purchase the considerable equipment, buildings and property of the French company that had failed to build a canal in Panama. In the best modern tradition of lobbying, they went around bad mouthing Nicaragua by saying it had dangerous volcanoes that would destroy the canal. No one paid attention. Just before the critical congressional vote, on May 8, 1902 Mt. Peele erupted and totally wiped out St. Pierre, a thriving city of 30,000 in the Caribbean. The vote for Panama wasn’t close.

Hurricane Beulah changed my life in 1967. I spent my first night in Texas at the Villa Capri in Austin. We were hit by a tornado. I heard that people in the lower valley were cut off and had no food. So my first three weekends as a UT graduate student were spent carrying food to the lower Valley. On highway 241 just north of Falfurrias I came to a police barricade facing the other way. At first the police refused to believe I had come from Alice They explained that the barricade was to keep people from drowning. I was the first car to make it into the lower valley on 241 after Beulah hit.

Back in Austin one of my professors sharply criticized me for wasting time helping flood victims. He was emphatic that my job as graduate student was to save the world and the government would take care of flood victims. Because of his remarks I lost my faith in graduate school and soon dropped out. In my three weekends in the lower valley I never once saw government help anyone. The only other helper I ran into was the Salvation Army. This changed my world forever. As a New Yorker I had believed to my core that we were dependent on government for most things in life. From that moment on I realized that government could never be relied upon during a crisis. We were responsible for our lives. People produce and make things happen, not government. I started becoming a Texan.

Some limited Public Policy Implications of Katrina

This is the time to create a national ID card. I hate the thought. But we already have one in the form of our social security cards. We will never get control of our borders without a national ID card. Trying to use drivers’ licenses to track down terrorists is irrational. The million refugees created by Katrina will be floating all over the US. Few have ID and none of those Ids will be of value. Since we will have to put them on a national database anyway we might as well bite the bullet and create a national ID card, linked to social security, for everyone.

Its time to encourage the use of manufactured housing for people who need shelter. Homeless advocates scream murder at any mention of using mobile or manufactured homes for the homeless. Their opposition makes no sense. The lowest cost "affordable" homes run $80,000 to $100,000. Manufactured homes with the same space cost one fifth as much. Far from being your aunt’s mobile home, newer manufactured homes are as sturdy and roomier than the thousands of homes built in Levittown, which gave the American middle class its first exposure to suburban living in the 1950s.

Avoid long-term refugee camps. The Palestinians were placed in refugee camps.more than 50 years ago and they haven’t left. Our refugees don’t have homes to go back to. They need to be mainstreamed rapidly into schools and society. They need jobs, schools, churches and places to live. They are Texans.

Declare an education emergency and do whatever works. Hopefully many children will quickly be located in homes within thriving school districts. But many will need to spend months in shelters in school districts already overflowing with refugees from other states and Mexico. We need to be creative and do whatever works best. It might be best to have some schools created in or near shelters. It might be best to temporarily waive all teaching and administrative credential requirements to create special schools. This is an emergency. We don’t want to destroy our already fragile school districts by injecting many emotionally wrought students. Discipline will need to be strong. Many uncredentialized people would make excellent temporary teachers. .

Some Implications of Katrina on Politics

Reading the New York Times leads one to believe that George Bush is the mother of all incompetence. This would normally forebode poorly for Republicans. But my most accurate source of prognostication, namely the Irish bookies at Tradesports.com, say otherwise.

Until Katrina the smart money said that our next President would be a Democrat, undoubtedly Hillary. In the last couple of days the smart money said the Republican nominee would win. I can only postulate three possible reasons for this counterintuitive shift. 1) The odds for the Republican nominee, for the first time since Katrina, favor Guiliani, not Allen or McCain. 2) The sheer magnitude of the New Orleans disaster has buried worse news such as Iraq, Sheehan, Rove and even Aruba. 3) Although Bush was slow to get moving, the massiveness of his response looks good.

In time we’ll get a good idea of who dropped what balls. But most of us will probably be very forgiving in that this was the greatest natural disaster in American history. In politics the last Act is remembered best.

The closest this tragedy has to a Rudolf Giuliani inspirational leader is our own Rick Perry. When things were darkest Governor Perry stepped up to the plate and opened the Red Sea, or at least the Sabine River, to the victims of Katrina. Before Perry spoke there was only despair. After he spoke there was hope and optimism. Like all great leaders he radiated confidence. He may not have had any idea what he was doing, but when he said he said Texas would take care of the refugees you knew he meant it and they would be taken care of.

Every print and TV media I’ve seen in the last three days has praised Texans to the skies. Even that sourpuss Greta Van Susteren on FOX was downright giddy about how well Perry and Texas are doing with the refugees.

I think the secret here is that we Texans are all refugees. We were born free in the international arena. We were never anybody's colony. Free of all government, we learned to have faith in ourselves and accept responsibility for our destiny. With reliance on our families, friends and churches we built the finest civilization of the face of this earth. We believe in ourselves and in the worth of all human beings.

I still don’t believe in government. I believe in Texans.

God bless Texas.

ã Copyright September 6, 2005 by Harvey Kronberg, www.quorumreport.com, All rights are reserved

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Reprinted with permission by the author and Quorum Report.

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