making lemonade...

So I've been thinking for a while about how to blog the positive things about Katrina....

Frank Stronach, who airlifted evacuees from New Orleans to Palm Beach, Fla. all while he is bankrolling the construction of a new mobile-home community, complete with school and community centers in Louisiana for more than 300 victims of hurricane Katrina....

Sean Penn working round the clock to help rescue his fellow New Orleanians while Matthew McConaughey pitches in with the Humane Society to rescue dogs and cats...

Kids across the country stuffing backpacks with school supplies to make the first day of school as normal as possible for displaced little ones.

Then, yesterday, I picked up the New York Times and started reading a briliant op-ed by David Brooks, Katrina's Silver Lining. Essentially, Brooks sees the entire katrina experience as a fantastic opportunity--one to stop urban poverty and inequity in its tracks and redesign and rebuild New Orleans into one of the greatest cities in the world--without centuries of cultural strife and urban dissent. Genius.

Katrina was a natural disaster that interrupted a social disaster. It separated tens of thousands of poor people from the run-down, isolated neighborhoods in which they were trapped. It disrupted the patterns that have led one generation to follow another into poverty.

It has created as close to a blank slate as we get in human affairs, and given us a chance to rebuild a city that wasn't working. We need to be realistic about how much we can actually change human behavior, but it would be a double tragedy if we didn't take advantage of these unique circumstances to do something that could serve as a spur to antipoverty programs nationwide.

In all this tragedy, David Brooks has given me immense hope...what if we can wipe the slate clean? What happens when the haves and the have-nots live side by side? What happens when centuries of oppression are literally washed away? Where can humanity go with a fresh start?

And isn't it cool that the city that can make all this happen is one of the most beautiful, fresh, culturally amazing ones in the world? I say...bring it on.

Fix your jones for the end of social inequity as we know it @ David Brooks' column.

Posted by sarah t. at 2:08 PM