In Setback for New Orleans, Fed-Up Residents Give Up - New York Times

In Setback for New Orleans, Fed-Up Residents Give Up - New York Times:

The 'Big Easy' is easy to leave. The people who are leaving, never to return, are doing so for good reason. If there is no hope for improvement in a city run by incompetents, why stay? Yet, in the last election, the voters decided that Nagin was their man for mayor. Could it be that the choices were no better?

If global warming forecasters say the sea will rise a meter or two in the next couple of hundred years, sad as it may seem, the city is best left to return to the swampland it once was.

Tragic consequences, perhaps, but are the alternatives much better? Spending untold billions on levees to protect a city no one wants to live in is foolishness of the first order. Better to let the sea have it.


"...have made the wrenching decision to leave at a time when the population is supposed to be rebounding. Their reasons include high crime, high rents, soaring insurance premiums and what many call a lack of leadership, competence, money and progress. In other words: yes, it is still bad down here. But more damning is what many of them describe as a dissipating sense of possibility, a dwindling chance at redemption for a great city that, even before the storm, cried out for great improvement. "?The window of opportunity is closing," Ms. Larsen said, "?before more people like us give up and say it'?s too little, too late.""