Good God. We are supposed to pay for this thing because you don't want Mardi Gras kids going to your town? Geez.
We're supposed to pay for it because New Orleans is important to America.
The quiet resistance New Orleanians practiced during the Butler regime, that became a model for the rest of the South when we also fell after the war, and in fact, served as the inspiration for Joe Cain's infamous wagon stand
Most people don't realize this, but the only reason Mardi Gras survived the Civil War is because in the cities that had had it before the war, it was decided that continuing the tradition was one way to thumb their noses at federal authorities without committing an act that Union officials could create trumped up charges for.
Also, the simple fact that, New Orleans actually can be saved, you can rebuild the levees in a way where this never happens again, if you combine this with a wetland renourishment program in the areas to the immediate south of St. Bernard, you could effectively eliminate the danger of this ever happening again.
New Orleans has flooded from hurricanes before, and this never happened. Wihtout the levees, it would have been like Betsy, like 1947, like 1915, like Last Island, and many hurricanes before that. The problem with the levees were that inherent design flaws existed which caused them to fail. After all, the New Orleans Cat 5 disaster scenario never involved the the levees breaking, it involved water higher than the levees topping them, creating the dreaded bowl situation. No one expected that the levees would crack, thereby causing a flood of water equalization.
It makes as much sense today to rebuild New Orleans today as it did to rebuild Galveston 105 years ago. While I don't think New Orleans will ever be like it was (this could be a good thing) it is still vital to our economy, the city is an economic and cultural asset, and it would be a tragedy to let it slide into history. On the streets of New Orleans, you see the way society used to be, the way that neighborhoods used to look like, in many ways, New Orleans never really left it's antebellum mindset, and that is an asset to America. The fact that New South banking interests were able to build skyscrapers and co-exist with all the varied components of what was the epitome of the Old South, it was an important message.
Now maybe it would be smarter to trash all levies, and go back to the situtation where we let the city flood once every 10 years, and let the sedimentation deposit. Thats a possibility. But it would be sad to desert a city that meant so much to America. A city which had as much to do as anything else with keeping Huey Long from becoming President.
Good God. We are supposed to pay for this thing because you don't want Mardi Gras kids going to your town? Geez.>>>>>>>>
I will go along with that as long as he will pay to relocate I-95 so that I can't hear the traffic noise in the winter when the leaves fall off the hardwoods. Tit for Tat.