Levees Not War

Our friend Schroeder at People Get Ready rightly points out that in a city beset by so many problems at once, New Orleans residents have to choose their battles. Levees Not War focuses on infrastructure and coastal restoration, but we also urge our readers—in the Sunken City and beyond—to help save Charity Hospital, a towering embodiment of the social contract built with obsessive attention to detail by Huey Long in the 1930s, from an expensive, unnecessary, and largely destructive plan by the LSU Medical School and the Veterans Administration that would raze it and about 250 structures in the surrounding neighborhood (all on the National Historic Trust for Historic Preservation’s list of America’s Most Endangered Places). (See Action Contact List below, and coverage by Squandered Heritage, NOLA-dishu, and Library Chronicles. And here you can see a short video by the Historical Louisiana Foundation showing how Charity can be modernized economically.)

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On this Thanksgiving Day we are grateful for family and friends and our work that sustains us—as well as for life’s simple pleasures (like crawfish and pecan pies) and the opportunities we’re given to make the world a better place.

We are also especially thankful that the American people voted in large numbers and so enthusiastically for an excellent new president (-elect) who is already restoring hope and confidence in our people—and around the world. May God guide him with wisdom and keep him safe and in good health always. (We pray the same for all our public officials.)

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Celebration in Grant Park, Chicago. BBC photo.

Glory hallelujah! are the first two words that come to mind. After eight long years in the wilderness, it hardly seemed possible anymore that such a fine, worthy candidate could win in the United States, especially by such a large margin. And yet over the course of the past year we’ve felt the tide of history moving in a new, more hopeful direction. That new direction was celebrated last night in Grant Park, Chicago, and around the nation and the world.

“. . . two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century . . .” There is so much difficult work to be done by the next president and his administration, it’s a good thing he is young and energetic—and that he has, as his vice president says, “a spine of steel.” He’s going to need it. It’s a good thing, too, that he has a gift for inspiring exceptional efforts by his staff and supporters.

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