PUBLISHED: 09-29-08

Letter to the Editor

Re: Time to stop rebuilding a doomed city

I opened the Commentary section of The Chronicle this Wednesday and was greeted with a headline I thought was so completely callous that I assumed, at first, it was sarcastic. “Time to stop rebuilding a doomed city,” with an accompanying picture of a ruined New Orleans home. A quick read of the article in question made it clear it was no joke.

I’m sure that to the residents of New Orleans (many of which, I’m sure Ms. Reinhart remembers, were re-located to Columbia) the shocking ignorance of a college press thousands of miles away is nothing in comparison to the devastation wrought by nature and exacerbated by the staggering incompetence of the Bush administration, but it still needs to be addressed.

It is true that the process of rebuilding a wrecked community is expensive. The Americans who live in the tornado alleys of Kansas and on the fault lines crisscrossing the state of California can attest to that.

However, I doubt any reasonable publication would allow one of its writers to suggest those areas be abandoned and their inhabitants uprooted and forced to live elsewhere (where they may or may not be welcome).

Perhaps Ms. Reinhart needs to be reminded that New Orleans, one of the greatest cities in American history and certainly the most unique, is home to more than a million Americans. This number does not include, of course, the several hundreds of thousands who live in the shadow of the levees but not in the limits of the city proper-Americans Ms. Reinhart would also have relocated.

It’s seems to me almost absurd to be writing this letter, the impossibility of Ms. Reinhart’s “plan” is so head-slappingly obvious I can’t believe it was ever published. That is not to mention her (it must be said) inhuman lack of compassion for the people she plans to uproot. I can assure The Chronicle’s readers that the residents of New Orleans do not find their way of life, their culture and friends and family and small businesses merely “charming.” Where does she plan to send them? And doesn’t she realize the cost of finding more than a million people new homes, transportation and jobs would far exceed the cost of rebuilding parts of a single city? Not to mention the depths to which our already weak economy would plunge when over a million people who had been working on restoring one of the tourism capitals of the world were suddenly jobless, homeless, not able to spend money and in a strange new place where it might be months or years until they can get back on their feet.

I could write pages and pages more on this, perhaps mentioning the fact that the government who created this mess by ignoring (and possibly continuing to ignore) global warming and appointing business cronies to head underfunded emergency relief organizations and doing nothing to stem the rising tide would be worse than evil to now turn their back on the city again. I won’t.

Perhaps a retraction would be an empty gesture at this point, but I think one is warranted. I hope to see it in the next edition of The Chronicle. If not, I at least hope to see something that addresses Ms. Reinhart’s commentary.

Wes Giglio

Junior

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