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Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc on the Mississippi Gulf Coast region 17 months ago.  As we drove into New Orleans a few weeks ago, we were astonished to see that it looked like it had happened 17 weeks ago.

We had 3 goals for New Orleans:

• learn about the area and it’s history,
• see first hand the history pre and post Katrina and
• to find any volunteer work we could do to get the kids involved in understanding how these communities were affected and the importance of helping out.

As we drove into the city, we came across the bay on I-10 - the short little 7-mile bridge.  It seemed like a long way over water, but later on that night we would go across Lake Pontchartrain over the world’s longest causeway at 24 miles and have a new definition of both long bridge and white knuckles as it was completely dark, unlit, very little traffic and raining.  And yes, I could have done without the high winds warning sign knowing that we were more top heavy with the car-top carrier.

If you haven’t seen Katrina’s damage either first-hand or on the news, try this: picture a neighborhood of houses where you live, maybe your own, now picture nearly every one of them with water lines halfway up first floor windows, broken windows, search and rescue painted notes, having a FEMA trailer parked out in the front or side yard with semi-permanent sewage and electrical hookups, oh, and trash from partial cleanups still in everyone’s drive waiting for pickup.

We drove through the wealthier Uptown and poorer 9th Ward neighborhoods and Katrina made them look eerily similar.  She didn’t play favorites as tornados do when they rip through trailer park after trailer park.  Katrina was an equal opportunity destroyer.  So much so, that after loading nearly 2000 mops into regional bins at a local food bank, we drove to an address supplied by Volunteers for America and at first glance it looked just as poor as the area we just left.

However, when I knocked on the door a very nice lady answered the door and we talked a bit and what we talked about left me a little unsettled.  As I told her that we were from Indianapolis and moving our family, in an adventurous way, to California and that we were looking for volunteer work, she disclosed that her father owned both of the Ruth’s Chris of Indy and that the volunteers had already finished his beautiful restoration.  I could see into the house beautiful hardwood floors, crown molding and someone who appeared dressed in uniform cleaning up after the kids.

As we drove away, I explained this to Julie and it just bowled us over that someone with financial resources was using volunteer work to restore their house and a mile down the road there was very little sign of restoration in neighborhoods where people obviously lacked resources.

Now, I’ve seen Mayor Ray Nagan on CNN, MSNBC and the like and my opinion of him is, well, not flattering.  After seeing New Orleans up close, I view him in an even worse light - which hardly seemed possible.  And my view of President Bush has followed the public trend of the past 6 years and I now see him in line with Nagan.  New Orleans is proof that these two cannot manage a disaster and Iraq is proof that both poor planning and execution is a recipe for disaster and fraudulent waste when it comes to rebuilding a community.

So, here’s a thought to fix both New Orleans and Iraq.  Leave it to the entrepreneurs.  Put all of what remains in the disaster relief fund and the war chest in the hands of local small business people and let a free economy fix what’s broken.  Sure, there will be scammers, but not as much as the current bureaucratic systems have.  And entrepreneurs will fix what needs fixing as it will be paramount to their survival as business owners.

Forget the Haliburtons and the mountains of red tape and executive payrolls.  Leave it to Clyde’s Plumbing, Stan’s Grocery Mart and Ray’s Trash to help out their own in such a way that they can still make an honest living 2 years from now by doing good, honest, hard work now to get their neighborhoods functioning again.  And the let the Iraqi’s do the same.  Lock down Baghdad in martial law with a 20-mile, high voltage perimeter fence.  Let supplies in, but keep new people out.  Then leave it to the locals to purge militants who wish to blow up their storefronts and their futures.

People will do funny things when given an opportunity to thrive.  They band together and along with internally-motivated change comes pride.  And pride will rebuild a city whether in middle America or middle Iraq.

A few nights before arriving in New Orleans, we were watching the television show Boston Legal.  In that episode, two lead characters traveled to New Orleans to try a case and they played Fats Domino’s ‘Walking to New Orleans’.  That has become a favorite song of the kids and New Orleans has left quite an impression on us.  Both for the beauty and uniqueness like no other city we’ve seen and for the tragic lost opportunity for a devastated city to bond together and do what few communities get the chance to do - strip down to the basics and re-think how we interact and depend on each other.