Ten years after Hurricane Katrina, commemorations are taking place across the country, but most especially across the Gulf South - and most particularly because of so much that changed and so much that didn't.
New Orleans was left to fend for herself, the beautiful Crescent City punished for daring to be proudly Chocolate, its inhabitants strewn across the nation and disappeared forever by gentrification and White-ification.
The hurricane made landfall in southern Louisiana on Aug. 29, 2005, and the combination of storm surge, pounding rain, high winds, and decades of environmental destruction of the wetlands that had historically protected New Orleans from major hurricane damage all conspired to create the “perfect storm.”
From the tip of Louisiana to the top of New Orleans, more than 50 levees failed. For New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish, the failures of the 17th Street, the London Avenue, and the Industrial Canals brought utter devastation.
Ten years ago, New Orleans lay under water, her people screaming from rooftops, dying of thirst, drowning in filthy water, while the entire world watched in horror.
I remember the morning I stood at the bottom of the stairs, screaming to my husband upstairs, “The levees broke!”
Though those stairs, and my home, were thousands of miles from the New Orleans I'd left four years earlier, I'll never stop loving that city, never stop missing its vibrancy and sensual embrace of life, its culture, food, and music.
But most of all, I'll never stop loving the people of New Orleans.
I'd spent that weekend calling everyone I knew down there - family, friends, former colleagues - pleading and begging and crying for them to get out.
I knew, I just knew.
Since then, there've been a multitude of remembrances, tears shed, stories told, memorials consecrated, bells rung, and hymns sung.
But none of it means a thing so long as we, as a nation, continue to stand by.
One year later, this was the reality: More than half the city lay in ruins, and many neighborhoods still lacked reliable utilities, functioning sewer lines, even potable water.
Most city services had been drastically reduced or eliminated, most jobs had not returned, and only charter-ized schools could afford to open, leaving most public schools closed. Most hospitals and clinics remained closed, the legal system remained in disarray, and only 5 percent of the homes had been rebuilt.
The suicide rate had tripled, the murder rate was front-page news, stress-related illnesses multiplied, and every day throughout the day someone else would “lose it” at the big-box home improvement stores.
Mounds of garbage, the detritus of hollowed-out houses and gutted lives, were ubiquitous, a constant reminder - along with the broken roads, the shattered buildings, the vast tracts of silent neighborhoods - that this great American city had been left to fend for itself.
How in the world, with all the money Congress had appropriated for rebuilding, did things go so wrong?
The answer was that neither the people nor the city of New Orleans received very much of the billions appropriated so far. Instead, the money was given to federal agencies like FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers, who then awarded contracts to private companies to carry out the work.
The trouble was, they didn't. According to a GAO study, approximately 70 percent of the funds appropriated by Congress were subcontracted out by the primary awardee; even worse, the work was often subcontracted out further as many as six times before reaching the final company that did the work at anywhere from one-half to one-twentieth the cost.
In other words, everybody took their cut, skimming off the relief money until almost nothing remained. There was no oversight.
This is privatization run amok. It's also cronyism run amok because two-thirds of our money was being awarded, mostly in no-bid and low-bid contracts, to a small number of large corporations, a half-dozen of which have deep, financial ties to the Bush White House and the Republican Party: Halliburton's KBR division, AshBritt, Fluor Corporation, CH2M, CB&I (then the Shaw Group), and Bechtel.
A Congressional report decried the use of these corporations and the fact that these corporations had done little or nothing with the unspecified and cost-overrunning billions that even they couldn't get FEMA to account for.
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Today, 10 years after I watched New Orleans drown, I still wonder whether our democracy drowned that day, too.
We've let our democracy slide so long that we've forgotten how to behave as citizens of our nation, behaving instead like obedient serfs resigned to our lot in life.
There's a reason our government has no oversight and doesn't have to answer to anyone but their major donors: we let them get away with it. We need to reclaim our democracy and begin acting as Americans again.
I know it's not going to be easy; it'll take years, and at times this process will seem hopeless and overwhelming.
But then, just imagine how the people of New Orleans felt - and continue to feel.