No, I don't think it's Obama's Katrina. I don't think it's anybody's.
You can talk about massive, preventable engineering failures, irreversible changes in culture, corporate greed, government impotence, whatever. There is one glaring difference between what happened 2005 and today: we could do something about it.
GF and I were among the very first back to our "de-watered" neighborhood. Our house was one of the few that didn't get water inside and so we were able to quickly set up a semblance of housekeeping--genny power, propane cooking, solar shower, etc. This enabled us to act as a kind of Welcome Wagon/basic training to other folks drifting back.
As each person returned, there were simple (and not so simple) tasks to be done to begin erasing the impact of The Thing. The first step, always: get the fridge out of the house. Duct tape the damn thing 'til King Kong couldn't escape, load-strap it to a hand truck and haul it to the curb. Do not pass Go, do not collect 200 coffin flies.
Then the sorting. Find the paperwork and the pictures, get them laid out on the porch to dry. Then the long process of going through furniture, mementos, geegaws, the accumulations of a lifetime, evaluating what can be salvaged and getting the rest out to the street for the bobcats and bulldozers.
The work went on, in ways large and small, for a long time. Gutting sheetrock (four feet or the whole wall?), organizing rides to Metairie for groceries, or downtown to the drug store trailer by the Convention Center. As services slowly came back, checking people's gas lines for water and electrical boxes for signs of flood before sparking up became part of the daily rounds.
There were milestones--The Night of the Stereo, when shore power first returned, Thanksgiving in the back yard, all the neighbors gathered around a sawhorse and plywood table piled with food cooked at friends' houses in working neighborhoods, Christmas, with more lights on the house than I've ever wanted before, a twinkling fist shaken in the gods' faces.
But most of the improvements in our lives were small, made by our own hands and those of friends and neighbors and dear, kind-hearted strangers who came to do what they could. We couldn't Make The Thing Not Have Happened, but we could at least get an old lady a hot bath and a plate of beans and rice.
When people look back and talk about the "resilience" of the city after the flood, that's what they're talking about. For those of you following the series "Treme," think Clarke Peters' Mardi Gras Indian chief, who can't fix his city or resurrect his dead friends, but, by god, he can clean out his bar and start his tribe practicing for Carnival and St. Joseph's Day.
And that is the difference: the power to make some tiny part of this massive horror a little better with our feeble but willing paws doesn't apply here. None of us has a five-thousand-foot shovel we can pull out of our flooded sheds. No bobcat using a mattress in its jaws is going to sweep up this mess. It's just going to keep getting messier for months. Or years.
I'll admit one similarity between the two events, or at least predict it: whatever their individual stories, however the monster has disrupted their lives, the people who seem to respond best to this challenge will be those who were a little crazy to begin with.
Peace to all.