The past has claimed another year, and it goes without saying that for those of us from the Gulf Coast it is a year we would rather forget. It is the one mercy of the passage of time that a terrible event, once it has occurred, can only recede.
I was in New Orleans again for New Year's weekend and again impressed at how things improve, slowly but relentlessly, no matter how bad the local government is and how much the federal government drags its feet. But this is the way people always are. The most surprising thing is that anyone doubted it would happen. People plan. They look forward. They always have, or else how would Europe have survived the Black Death in the Middle Ages? A quarter of Europe died in the plague epidemic then. But people just got up and kept on going. As did the world after two devastating world wars, and China after a hideous revolution and Mao's purges thereafter. They all still stand.
A month ago, New Orleans Parish had 80,000 people. On New Year's Day, the new estimate is 135,000. It is predicted that that number will rise to 225,000 in a year. Even more impressive, the metropolitan area, once less than 250,000 shortly after Katrina, now stands at 930,000, and is expected to reach 1.1 million next year. Less than 2 weeks ago a New York Times editorial pronounced New Orleans a dying city. Though the city has many, many problems, far from being moribund, it is again one of America's 40 largest cities.
The hard work of life is not done by politicians, or newspapers, or pundits. It is done by countless, nameless people who make decisions every day. The leaders have a lot less to do with it than they think they do.
I think 2006 will be the year that New Orleans and the Gulf Coast will move on, without the politicians. The good folks down there, including several of my family members, will continue to rebuild, and work, and fight, no matter what the leadership says they should or should not be doing. If the leaders will just see to it that the levees get rebuilt and upgraded, we will see the rest come together, slowly, but almost magically.
The prognosticators need to get over themselves. Katrina was an act of God. Recovery is not an act of Congress; it is an act of the people.