University of Virginia, New Orleans Journals\r\n\r\nThursday, January 12, 2006\r\n\r\nRyan C. Fleenor, College of Arts & Sciences\r\n\r\nIt has been very easy over the last few days to get caught up in \r\n\r\nlarge details -- the thousands of homes destroyed, the jobs lost, \r\n\r\nor the amount of relief aid that has poured into the Gulf Coast. \r\n\r\nWhile fundamentally critical to any meaningful evaluation of the \r\n\r\npresent situation in New Orleans, such information is, I think, \r\n\r\nlimited in its ability to convey the extent to which, for many \r\n\r\npeople, life has been rendered unintelligible since August 2005. \r\n\r\nNo piece of data could ever convey the pain and frustration \r\n\r\nexperienced by so many here; to even try, it seems, serves \r\n\r\nonly to compress the voices of this great city\'s residents into \r\n\r\none more statistic to be printed and forgotten in the annals of \r\n\r\npublic policy and history. These statistics, these hard facts, \r\n\r\ncomfort us by empowering us to see the situation here as an \r\n\r\nequation to be solved or an engineering system to be tweaked \r\n\r\nto perfection. Such data lull us into believing -- falsely, I think -- \r\n\r\nthat we can fix all of our problems through the simple \r\n\r\napplication of cold reason and thoughtful public policy.\r\n\r\nUnfortunately, the real world is not so clear cut. We must \r\n\r\nremember that the disaster in New Orleans is as much a human \r\n\r\ncatastrophe as it was a natural disaster, and the people of this \r\n\r\ncity were as wounded as its infrastructure. Entire \r\n\r\nneighborhoods continue to fear that they may not be allowed to \r\n\r\nreturn home; with the stroke of one urban planner\'s pen, a \r\n\r\nneighborhood\'s civic identity and collective memory could \r\n\r\npotentially be forever lost. Many people have lost all faith in a \r\n\r\ngovernment that seems at best incompetent and, at worst, \r\n\r\nmalevolent toward its citizens. This was made abundantly clear \r\n\r\nwhen the city made public its audacious and contentious plan \r\n\r\nfor reconstruction during a press conference yesterday. The \r\n\r\nanger and sense of abandonment welling up within the men and \r\n\r\nwomen who rose to confront their government was like nothing I \r\n\r\nhad ever seen before.\r\n\r\nThe human scale of this catastrophe was made real for me \r\n\r\ntoday as I undertook the task of recovering, cleaning and \r\n\r\nrepairing the statues, plaques and historic artifacts of St. \r\n\r\nMary\'s School in New Orleans East. Founded in 1867, St. \r\n\r\nMary\'s has a long and proud heritage of providing educational \r\n\r\nopportunity for the African-American women of New Orleans. It \r\n\r\nwas this sense of memory and place that \"Team Trophy\" (as we \r\n\r\ndubbed ourselves) set out to preserve, and I am very proud of \r\n\r\nour work. As Sister Greta Jupiter, the school\'s principle, \r\n\r\nreminded us at lunch over Po-Boys, these artifacts may seem \r\n\r\nsmall and insignificant, but they will be the small tokens that help \r\n\r\nprovide continuity and identity as the school tries to secure its \r\n\r\nfuture in the face of damage estimates exceeding $4 million.\r\n\r\nIn our own small way, I hope we are helping those we meet \r\n\r\nreturn their lives to some semblance of normalcy and regularity. \r\n\r\nWhether that be gutting a house to begin the process of \r\n\r\nreconstruction or polishing an obscure trophy from the 1960s, I \r\n\r\nam glad we are here to do whatever we can. I just hope and \r\n\r\npray that we don\'t forget people like Sister Greta at St. Mary\'s, \r\n\r\nor Father Joe in the Lower 9th, or Sister Eileen here at Xavier \r\n\r\nPrep. It will be people like them who reconstruct the spirit of this \r\n\r\ncity, and it will be up to them to preserve its connection with its \r\n\r\nstoried past. I have every bit of faith that they are up to the task. \r\n\r\nOriginal URL: \r\n\r\nhttp://www.virginia.edu/topnews/releases2006/NewOrleansJourn\r\n\r\nal12.html