225BatonRouge.com - Blogs

It may be two years since Katrina, and supposedly we’ve all moved on, but lately I've been overwhelmed with her. I submitted a photograph I took in downtown Baton Rouge a few days after the storm for a friend’s charity fundraiser, and it brought back all the emotions of that time. As a media company, we were inundated in the weeks following the storm with stories of trauma, and of rumors of crime taking over our city. I couldn't escape from the horror at home or work, and I spent many days crying myself to sleep. As I was assigned to scour the Internet for displaced companies moving to Baton Rouge, it constantly reminded me of how the city as I knew it was so rapidly changing right before my eyes. I do tend to be disinterested in a lot of the coverage, frankly because I'm tired of hearing who is to blame, instead of what people are doing to fix it (what they're really doing, that is—not just proposing). When I sit down and consider it all, everything rushes back like a freight train—and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

This past Thursday, I attended the One Book One Community book talk with Times-Picayune editor, Jed Horne, who talked about his book, Breach of Faith (click here to see some pictures and captions from the event). It took 10 minutes hearing him tell his personal story and I broke down in tears yet again. He was in Mexico when Katrina struck, and his colleagues and friends in New Orleans had to rely on him to relay the world's coverage of what was happening to their city. While Horne described watching his newspaper colleagues piling out of vans at LSU's journalism school in complete disrepair—and realizing they were now homeless—I glanced around me and saw just about everyone was teary and completely in the moment—even the facilitator. It’s an experience we all shared as a community, and no matter how much time passes, the grief, sadness and helplessness is still there, waiting for the right shared moment to come pouring out once again.

Horne was candid, speaking frankly about what he thinks were and are the problems, and what should be done to fix them. He often cited the Dutch for their flood control work in Rotterdam and Amsterdam, and at one point, he made it clear the money we’re spending in Iraq is what it would take to rebuild New Orleans and the levee system (that lit the room up with applause.) He commended the work of the community and civic and church groups, saying they have been the ones making an impact on the recovery, not the government.

Horne's talk really moved me (if you missed it, you can watch it here). Baton Rouge and New Orleans are worlds apart politically, yet we, as well as any other community, are in a position to comprehend and empathize with what happened. With that understanding we owe it to ourselves to do something.

By doing something, whether it's as small as discussing a book, or attending an exhibit, or physically working to rebuilding that city, we are taking steps to engage people and to heal our own wounded souls. By keeping it in the forefront here, maybe the rest of the country can recognize that it's not over, that we aren't all fine, and there’s still so much work to do.