America's Other 'Ground Zero'

"Downtown, the streets of the Quarter are empty, What is normally a vibrant and festive street scene of red-lit bars blaring Dixieland jazz and gift shops packed with beads, stuffed alligators, and Café du Monde now seems cartoonish and in bad form, a hustle as cheap as trying to sell the Brooklyn Bridge. Every third or fourth business is closed or for sale, and "50% off!" signs hang in the windows of the mostly empty shops that are still hanging on. Inside the music is too loud, and the shopkeeps stare out the narrow French doors across the rain swept cobblestones.

It makes you wonder how they can continue to sell kitsch when they know in their hearts that the whole world has seen the real New Orleans now, and the Mardi Gras shtick isn’t cuttin’ it any more. They’re going broke trying to sell a memory.

...[On] the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks...no one in New Orleans seemed to be paying attention. And why should they? While the rest of the nation was glued to a tiny plot of land in Lower Manhattan they call "ground zero," an entire city lay in ruins like the real Nagasaki, and hundreds of thousands are still homeless. And while the populace is bludgeoned to death about the "evil" that we face from those abroad, there is no talk of the those that were left to die here, or the “evil" that exists when a government is so over-mortgaged in people and expenses that they can’t even take care of the mess in their own backyard."