I’d like to interrupt the New Orleans victory parade for a brief reality-check announcement. As you guys peel yourselves off the streets in the French Quarter, and as you ring out your liquor-soaked livers like you would a dish rag, and as you gleefully suffer through a brain-crushing hangover, do me one favor:
Remember the Lower Ninth Ward.
As you make your preparations to bring your tithes and offerings to Drew Brees, I’d like to bring some deserved attention, some overdue attention, some desperate attention, to the still-dilapidated Ninth Ward with its woefully underachieving schools, its dangerous neighborhoods and its blatantly neglected infrastructure. I’d like to shine some light on the area that you never rebuilt, the area that you probably don’t intend to ever rebuild: the Lower Ninth Ward.
For the past three or four years, I’ve had to listen to the nauseatingly hollow rhetoric about a rebuilt and revitalized New Orleans. But then I visit New Orleans again and again, and the Ninth Ward looks like Hurricane Katrina swept her powerful hand across the region just the other day. The people there are not a part of the wild pre-Mardi Gras festivities that are probably still going on at this moment.
No, the people who live — or better yet, languish — in the Ninth Ward are not celebrating the New Orleans Saints Super Bowl victory with much zeal. It was ghostly quiet on these streets even as the rest of the city exploded in bliss. While quarterback Drew Brees provided a beautiful all-American snapshot as he hoisted his son in his arm, some of the forgotten people of the Ninth Ward were scanning the sea of humanity on Bourbon Street, looking for a come up. Some are probably now patrolling the French Quarter looking for an illicit way to get something to eat for the next week or so. They stand on the periphery of the dizzying display of delirium with nothing to celebrate or go back home to except tall servings of misery, neglect, violence and hopelessness.
Of course, most of the residents of the Ninth Ward are trying to repair their homes and their lives through faith and hard work while still looking to the local government to appropriate funds into their area the way they did for the rest of the hurricane-battered city. Some residents have already given up, resigning themselves to living in squalor. Others looked on at the citywide party with envious eyes, angered that they were forced to flee to other cities because their government left them hanging after the levees broke. And others are going to find a way to make a living by any means necessary. And that means by whatever means it takes to survive. These are the people in need of a miracle-type ending that met their beloved football team. The football team has been completely rebuilt. Now it’s time to rebuild the Lower Ninth Ward. –terry shropshire