The last few days of Hurricane Katrina coverage have been some of the most gut wrenching news coverage most of us have seen since the September 11th attacks. A major U.S. city now sits underwater while we watch its poor, helpless residents clinging to their rooftops waiting for rescue. Surrounding areas devastated with hardly a structure left standing. The stranded evacuees. The looting. Hundreds probably dead and tens of thousands likely left homeless.
Much of the reporting is certainly worth reading, yet Slate's article by assistant editor Josh Levin stands out in my mind. Levin, who grew up in New Orleans, shares his poignant thoughts on the destruction of his home town:
I have to keep reminding myself that this is the same patch of land where I went to school and played baseball and had dinner with my grandparents every Friday night. Every time some new, awful report bubbles up—of prisoners rioting, of looters menacing Children's Hospital, of water so high there aren't roofs to wave a white flag from, of people lying on the interstate waiting for someone to tell them where to go and what to do—New Orleans seems more like a scene out of 28 Days Later than a place where people ever lived and worked and raised their families.
A little more than 48 hours after Katrina strafed the city, I'm starting to mourn a place that's not quite dead but seems too stricken to go on living....
Read the complete article: Mourning My New Orleans: Our family has lived there for a century. Where will we go now?