What is it that the government should have learned from New Orleans that they shouldn’t repeat now?
One of the thing that was most tragic for me when I came back was there was a house down the street from us that had been a halfway house for drug addicts, [people with] mental illness, the gamut of the sort of society-forgotten people. Those residents were the people who patrolled my neighborhood. Those are the people who made sure that no one broke in my house. That knew that when the car was in the driveway that I was around and could mow my lawn. I mean those were people that are part of my neighborhood, and they were a part of my life….And this sort of government sort of overlooked the fact that the city is conglomerate of everybody. You don’t have a city or community without those that are less fortunate. And there was a sort of idea that we were in some sort of Darwinian race here, like the only people that get to come back are the ones that are strong enough to fight or young enough to fight. One day I woke up and realized I was the oldest person in my neighborhood—at 51 years
