Former Senator Larry Craig, he of a certain bathroom stall incident at the Minneapolis airport, was one American disinclined to rebuild New Orleans.
"Louisiana and New Orleans are the most corrupt governments in our country and they always have been," Craig was quoted as saying in the McCall (Idaho) Star-News. "A rookie cop on the ground in New Orleans, they pay him or her $17,000 starting pay and then wink and say you better make the rest of it on the street."
"I'm not humorous when I suggest we should turn it back to what it was, a wetland," Craig told the Lewiston Tribune (Idaho), saying that some areas of the Gulf, including New Orleans' flooded Ninth Ward, should be abandoned.
As they say in the South: Mmmm-hmmm.
Was it not time to spend the FEMA money and repair the wetlands, the infrastructure and the living spaces of this city? Are we not: Linked.
Two men arrived at the finish line of the Ironman competition with a string of rope joining them hip-to-hip. They rode bikes, swam in Lake Pontchartrain (Ponch-a-train) and ran through the city for seventy miles: Linked.
After Katrina, in St. Bernard's Parish, people waited days for help in ungodly temperatures. They sat on rooftops under a blue, cloudless sky and in heat so intense it burned their mouths to breathe. In some locations the water rose up to twenty feet. Panicked deer hopped from rooftop to rooftop, snakes and stingrays swam by and wild Russian boars searched for dry land. The first help some folks received was from Canada. A Vancouver-based search-and-rescue team arrived to serve. The neighborhood is now known as "Little Canada": Linked.
I had jumbling thoughts in my head as I raced along a sidewalk and passed an older black man sitting on a doorway stoop, sipping from a can of beer in a brown paper sack.
Smile! he shouted to me.
Shocked, I did exactly that. I smiled big and laughed out loud.
That's what I'm talkin' 'bout, he quipped. And we were: Linked.
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