Unmasking Our Pain in New Orleans

You may expect that an admission by a government agency that its poor work was responsible for the destruction of an American city would have been big news. But the story of the Corps' admission, released on a Thursday, didn't live long enough to make the Sunday talk shows. The confession was irrelevant. The nation had already concluded that the death of New Orleans was a suicide caused by our irrational desire to live in harm's way.

This blame-New-Orleans attitude has been devastating for us. Though Louisiana suffered far more damage per capita than did Mississippi, our neighbor to the east has received a disproportionate share of federal funding. But neither of us was treated fairly. Six weeks after the storm, Congress passed legislation allowing low-interest loans for Gulf Coast communities to use to pay public employees. But the White House and the Republican leadership in Congress specifically required that the money be paid back, even though such federal disaster loans have generally been forgiven for the past three decades. "Notwithstanding section 417 of the Stafford Act, such loans may not be canceled," the offending passage reads.

In its zeal to punish Louisiana for sins that are largely not of our own making, the federal government has twisted our national priorities so radically as to render them unrecognizable. In this era when homeland security is the nation's paramount concern, there is no enthusiasm for protecting American land along the coast of Louisiana. For the past several decades, we've lost an average of 24 square miles of territory every year. About 40 percent of U.S. wetlands are in Louisiana, but my state experiences 80 percent of the nation's coastal wetlands loss. This loss is crucial to us because hurricanes lose strength when traveling over this land and are thus less powerful when they reach populated areas. Fewer wetlands means more hurricane damage.

Two years ago, before Katrina, the Corps of Engineers and the state of Louisiana estimated that it would take $14 billion to stem the tide of coastal erosion. In December, the lame-duck Congress allocated 34 percent of the federal oil royalties collected off our shores to Louisiana to combat coastal erosion. But we won't get the full amount for 17 years. For the next decade, we will receive about $20 million a year to combat a $14 billion problem.

The latest forecast by coastal experts gives us about 10 years to restore the territory that has been lost south of New Orleans. If we fail to do that, those communities will have to be written off in a couple of decades.

If, say, Cuba or Venezuela had seized 24 square miles of American territory, the call to arms would have been immediate and decisive. But because coastal erosion is an enemy neither foreign nor domestic, we seem willing to surrender to it. We've retreated behind the excuse that New Orleans can't be saved. We've abandoned our can-do pride. In the Netherlands, the Dutch have managed to craft a flood-control system that protects the huge percentage of that nation's land that lies below sea level. These days Americans lack the money, the ingenuity, the patriotism, the humanity of the Dutch.

Much of the wealth of Louisiana lies in our culture. This is the state that gave the nation jazz and Louis Armstrong, Jerry Lee Lewis and Fats Domino. We created two of the nation's signature regional cuisines, Creole and Cajun. Our architecture is some of the oldest and most distinguished in the nation. But it seems that our country views our culture not as a national treasure worth saving, but as further evidence that we are not real Americans at all. But this view could change.

Earlier this month the Corps released the locations of 122 levees that are at risk of failing. They are located in 27 states and the District of Columbia. We New Orleanians have suffered much in the past 18 months. We wouldn't wish such devastation on anyone. But I would like to remind my nation that according to this list, the problems of my home town are not so foreign after all.

I may seem like a foreigner to you when I scream for an independent commission to study government failures in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, or when I decry the plodding incompetence of FEMA. I may seem like the stereotypical welfare cheat when I argue that the federal government has not invested nearly enough in protecting my state from an even greater future disaster. Indeed, mine may seem like a voice emanating from a distant Southern wilderness. But in truth, the problems of Louisiana are the problems of the United States.

Or, as Ralph Ellison wrote, "Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?"

lelie@tpmail.com

Lolis Eric Elie is a columnist for the

New Orleans Times-Picayune.