Would you ever have believed we could so quickly forget Katrina? A little more than two years have passed since the storm blew out of the Gulf to hammer the coast and drown New Orleans. Two years and change. And have we forgotten? As a country, yes, we have. I’ve spent the last two years directing a documentary, Desert Bayou, that follows some of the survivors of Katrina. I’ve been living and breathing this story. But I have to ask myself: if I wasn’t making the movie, if I wasn’t involved in telling the story, would I have forgotten too? Probably. So many promises were made back then. Every media heavyweight, just about everyone in government from the governor of Louisiana, through all 535 members of Congress, on up to the President of the United States, and millions of regular people, all vowed never to forget, never to rest until the Gulf Coast and the city of New Orleans had been made whole once again. Remember how we were never going to abandon those people? Remember how determined we were? We were going to do whatever it took. Whatever it took. And yet today you can compare photos from parts of New Orleans to parts of Haiti, and not be able to tell the difference. Of course we never much gave a damn about the poor of New Orleans before the storm. Let’s be honest. Our devotion to the poor has waned. We’ve had other things on our minds. The war. Excuse me, the wars. The stock market. American Idol. How about that Sanjaya? I mean, if we had cared before the storm, we …
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