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New Orleans is not optional for the United States' commercial infrastructure. It is a terrible place for a city to be located, but exactly the place where a city must exist. With that as a given, a city will return there because the alternatives are too devastating. The harvest is coming, and that means that the port will have to be opened soon. As in Iraq, premiums will be paid to people prepared to endure the hardships of working in New Orleans. But in the end, the city will return because it has to.

Now that's what I have been saying. NO has survived fire, flood, malaria, yellow fever, and lawlessness because it is needed.

But the old NO I grew up in is gone forever. And all the memories of riding the street car uptown on a March morning looking at the antebellum buildings filled with the pink of azaleas in bloom and that light quality that is special to the gulf coast will be locked in my heart.

But this new city will have a chance to learn from the past. I know it's Louisiana, but even there good things can happen!