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NEW ORLEANEANS QUIT 'BOWL CITY'  J. Grant Swank, Jr.

New Orleaneans lived in a bowl. Around it was water ready to swoop into
the bowl to swamp the bowl. Intelligent minds would then not rebuild in a
bowl asking for the swirl-about.

That's why there are thinking New Orleaneans who now inform media that
they are going to safer, saner turf to find another home, according to AP.

"'We're moving out of this stinking city,' Billy Tassin snarled as he
loaded his daughter's belongings into a truck, a day after finding his
home fouled with knee-deep mud. 'They can finish destroying it and burning
it down without us.'"

Stink. Garbage. Germs. No water. Litter. Cars drowned. Moldy walls.
Refrigerators giving out foul odors. Broken sewage networks.
>
"'It's just too hard,' said Ilona Toth, a Hungarian immigrant
businesswoman. 'Every year a hurricane is always coming. We always have to
evacuate, then clean up. It's too much trouble.'

"'I don't know how it's going to come together,' Taylor Livingston, 40,
said. 'I don't know if there's ever been a big city evacuated the way we
were evacuated. It's all new. I don't know that we can come back that
quick.'

"Katrina's death toll in Louisiana rose to 932 on Friday, the state health
department said, while Mississippi's toll climbed to 221 after a body was
found under a collapsed motel.

"In New Orleans' eastern reaches, authorities said they had found 14 dead
dogs. St. Bernard Parish spokesman Steve Cannizaro said 10 dogs were shot
to death at a middle school, and four more were found at an elementary
school. Authorities do not know who killed the animals."

It makes no sense to rebuild New Oralens in a bowl.

And yet the courageous sounding continue with the age-old baptized
mantra: "We will come back. We will rebuild."

That is commendable in that it is basically an emotional response to the
New Orleans and environs tragedy. But it is not reasonable.

Are we going to rebuild a city that is going to go under again and again
and again? The geography was warned over and over in the past by
professionals who forecast that the bowl would fill up with flood waters
one day. And now that apocalypse has come. We are experiencing the worst
disaster in the nation's history.

Would we rebuild in order to do a return of same in some year yet to be?
Would that be fair to the upcoming generations let alone to our own
logical present-tense see-throughs?

The whole time I was watching horrific scene by horrific scene, I kept
coming to the same conclusion: Let's not do that bowl thing again.
Americans are proud people. They don't like to be called quitters. They
are achievers and go on with the show.

But all that has nothing to do with constructing a city once more in a
bowl waiting for overflows. There is no guarantee that any system
whatsoever could ward off floodwaters. We American planners always feel we
have it safe and down pat. Sometimes we do. Then there are other times
when we are proven to have imperfect plans.

The obvious logic in this whole mess is to say forthrightly to one another
that we must learn from this not to be foolhardy in putting up another
metropolis in the very same location that could be vulnerable to more
mayhem in a short time to come? In a long time to come? In some time to
come? Whatever, it's not worth the gamble.

It's the same toss of the dice in California. It makes no sense to me to
build a house on the side of a potential mudslide. People do it. They take
pictures of their grand homes and send them all over the place. They brag
on their chances. And then calamity hits.

They go back and ask for the same mudslide spill all over again. I say
that when they walk into the fan another time, they deserve every
shredding they get. It's just not logical, and if Americans pride
themselves on anything, it's that they are so downright logical. Not so.

US House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) says the same thing. He told the
Daily Herald in a Chicago suburb that "'it doesn't make sense to me. And
it's a question that certainly we should ask.'" That answer was to the
question whether or not New Orleans should be resurrected on the same spot.

As reported by Bill Walsh of The Times-Picayune's Washington Bureau,
Hastert's remarks followed Congress cutting short its summer break in
order to return to DC to tend to emergency business.

As one can imagine, illogical pride rose to the occasion to counter
Hastert's comments. Those in charge from Louisiana scolded Hastert for
being so brash, so unfeeling, and so forth and so forth. Illogical pride
has a way of getting just a bit too emotional about things important at
times.

"'We help replace, we help relieve disaster,' Hastert said. 'But I think
federal insurance and everything that goes along with it. . .we ought to
take a second look at that.'

"Hastert questioned the wisdom of rebuilding a city below sea level that
will continue to be in the path of powerful hurricanes."

Now that makes sense.

And when it comes to those in California falling off their cliffs, knowing
full well that one of these days or nights the cliffs could give way,
don't give them any moneys by which to build another monster house again
on the slip side of existence.

Copyright © 2005 by J. Grant Swank, Jr.

Email: joseph_swank@yahoo.com





Copyright © 2005 by J. Grant Swank, Jr.


For More Information On This Story Visit: truthinconviction.us/weblog.php

Story Submitted By: joseph_swank@yahoo.com

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