The Lessons of Katrina

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It’s been about a week since the waters of Lake Pontchartrain inundated the city. The levees have been patched up and the draining of New Orleans has begun. The refugees — now called evacuees — have been taken to twenty different states, with about a quarter million people in Texas alone. Baton Rouge has doubled and Cape Cod is geting ready for a few thousand of its own. Erstwhile Red Sox pitching ace Curt Schilling has stepped in: he’s paying for a family of nine to live in Boston for the next year.

It’s time for us to step back and think about the long-term reverberations of Katrina’s aftermath.

There is no shortage of questions for our guests — who have yet to be determined — and for you: What is the role of government in the context of a disaster on the scale of Katrina? What about private citizens and groups? Or faith-based initiatives? Are we on the cusp of a sea-change in terms of our civic expectations? Will “big government” become more of a wish than an epithet?

And then there are the indelible — and shameful — images that played around the clock on U.S. televisions and throughout the world — images that have immediately brought to the fore the beginning of a new dialogue about race and poverty. By that I mean that, if nothing else, the words “race” and “poverty” have acutally been mentioned recently in the news.

So the largest question, and the one that perhaps would demand a sooth-sayer as much as a truth-teller: If Katrina has changed the way you view race, or poverty, or the role of government in America, what — if anything — will change as a result of it?