Brooks Sees Silver Lining in Katrina

New York Times columnist David Brooks claims that Hurricane Katrina presents the nation with an opportunity in New Orleans.

"That's because," Brooks writes, "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."

In other words, he asserts, New Orleans has become something of a "blank slate," an opportunity, even granting the peskiness of human imperfection, to give impoverished fresh starts. (That pesky quality, by the way, is what the Bible calls sin, a condition long before it results in specific acts called sins. It is the universal plight of the human race.)

Brooks goes on to suggest two principles that should guide a future rebuilding effort:

First, he says, "nothing like before." "If we just put up new buildings and allow the same people to move back into their old neighborhoods, then urban New Orleans will become just as rundown and dysfunctional as before."

Which leads to the second principle Brooks suggests for rebuilding: Culturally integrate people. Let impoverished families whose culture has always modeled failure, dysfunctionality, and limited horizons live near and go to school with families where expectations are higher. Brooks goes on to cite several studies and experiments in which the children of households who had this experience were positively impacted.

While I question the wisdom of spending a penny of federal tax dollars to re-establish New Orleans as anything other than making the French Quarter a Venice-like tourist destination and shoring up port facilities, I think Brooks is right that this presents the nation with an opportunity. After places have been dried out, people's medical needs have been addressed, the dead have been identified and mourned, and the full clean-ups have gotten underway, the focus needs to be even more on rebuilding people's lives than structures.

If we can culturally integrate the poor from New Orleans into America and given particularly their children opportunities to break the cycle of poverty, we will have taken a tragedy and extracted a great blessing from it...for the poor and for America.