No Looking Back

Media reports of the continuing post-Katrina cleanup now often include somber reminders that it will be a long time before things are back to normal in Gulf coast communities.

I hope so. Actually, I hope they never quite get there. "Normal" in the recent past included ignoring or dismissing the consequences of climate change, tolerating vast and growing disparities of wealth and opportunity, careless use of natural resources, and Federal public safety efforts that were essentially symbolic. Going back to the way things were merely invites a return to the way things are now in New Orleans.

In a piece in the journal World Changing, Alex Steffen argues that Katrina has forced the US into a reconsideration of priorities in much the way 9/11/01 did:

Katrina was a watershed moment. From here on out, the debate is over. Everything has changed, at least as dramatically as in wake of 9-11. From this moment forward, there is simply no ethical way to debate the need for a new, holistic, worldchanging approach to tackling the planet's biggest problems. As we begin thinking about how to rebuild New Orleans, we need also to recommit ourselves to a new vision for the future of the planet as whole.
We now live in a post-Katrina world. It's time for our thinking to catch up.
Read the rest.

I think the September 11 analogy is valid, but it raises some red flags. In the months just after the 2001 attacks, it seemed like we really were living in different times, as neither the government nor the citizens of the US could carry on with their ordinary ways of viewing (or not viewing) the rest of the world. But soon, it seemed like we were pretty much where we'd always been. We could go shopping; we could drive any vehicle we pleased; we could consume at our whim and not worry too much about the consequences. Foreigners were either scary or uncooperative, and best avoided if at all possible. We do live in a heightened state of anxiety, though that anxiety is exploited for dubious political and strategic purposes, a statesman's trick that isn't new at all. In short, we seem to have made a number of small changes in order to avoid or forestall larger ones.

Katrina has delivered another terse invitation to reconsider the ways we act, think, and place ourselves in the world. Here's hoping we accept.