Parallel Universes
August 8th, 2006
Let the anniversary media blitz begin: front and center of today’s NY Times home page: When masters of rebuilding are residents. I don’t have time to fully digest this now, but my first impression is one of looking in a funhouse mirror — there’s a reflection there, but you could get city dysmorphic disorder from taking it face value (a little more dry fact checking seems in order as well: e.g. the public meetings did not begin on August 1). I expect we’ll be seeing plenty of alternate New Orleanses over the next month. Maybe at the end we’ll get to vote on which one we’d like to live in.
August 8th, 2006 at 11:56 am
Speaking of Voting. My mother in law forgot to yesterday and you can still vote at the UNOP site.
The NY Times piece left me with uncomfortable sense that even the people paying attention can not get firm footing. The chaos and misinformation is updated daily with conflicting information and misleading initiatives. Should we care? I wish someone would tell us.
August 9th, 2006 at 2:17 am
The problem is always the way in which the rest of the country likes to look at New Orleans as if it were a Northern city with clear divides. The like to talk about the haves and have nots. When I look at New Orleans, I see have nots and have littles. The middle class is not as affluent here, and trying to say that our nieghborhoods are the same things as suburbs it not true.
August 9th, 2006 at 9:40 pm
I’d really like to see the research that warranted the comment in the article: “Not surprisingly, the more affluent neighborhoods have been the best organized.” I don’t know what the organization-level-to-wealth ratio is for all the neighborhoods that have already been planning for months, but I feel like this brushes off the accomplishments of a lot of very organized “have littles.”
August 10th, 2006 at 11:39 pm
A lot of “have littles” live in those neighborhoods that flooded. They’ve earned the right to be proud of what they’ve accomplished (like Broadmoor).
But the “have littles” may not be given the respect they deserve in the President Beavis world of “the haves, and the have mores,” to which the publisher of the NY Times belongs.