Overview

You could do no better to learn about the wider issues around the New Orleans disaster than to visit the updated page Ponchartrain basin then go to our friends here for a well reasoned and 'no quick fix' solution proposal.
You've read below how visiting the sites affected our party, and the widest of possible issues were raised in everyone's mind, and in our car conversations all the way back. Point one is the obvious repeatability of the event, this summer or next... point two, generally, is that everyone down there seems very clear and determined to rebuild their life... (point two b is that all of us northerners and furriners had our concepts of 'Southerners' smashed completely. We were met so often with sincere, smart and open people that the 'good ol' boy stereotype has gone.) Point three - perhaps more ambiguous and certainly more thorny (or 'itchy' as Trevor has it) is that the city formerly known as New Orleans (how do you rename it? New New Orleans??) was split along a racial divide - and, as Will pointed out, a socio-economic divide. It is increasingly clear that those neighborhoods will be rebuilt very slowly or not at all, and that therefore the inhabitants will be reabsorbed in the same manner. We were warned about hostility from 'those people', but without exception the African Americans' we met and spoke to were articulate, welcoming, outspoken, and yes angry, but not mindlessly so. there's a clear realization that while Nature is random and indifferent to your color and religion and class... floods are not random. they inundate unprotected areas, badly built housing, overspill from the city center high ground and (all of the above) the low rent neighborhoods. Even on the north side of Pontchartrain, which is pretty ritzy in parts, those shorefront homes which had been solidly built (i.e. expensively built) were restored and inhabited. the clapboard houses and the low income homes could not afford to be rebuilt, so they are still in a pile. Waveland Mississippi has been washed away, and the parts of St Bernard we saw remind me of the bombed cities of England after the war. the rubble still visible well into the 1960s of my childhood. For New Orleans - just using what we saw on this trip first hand, and what we were told, it seems that the preferred reconstruction of the city and area could be made without 'those people', building a beautiful city free of crime, poverty and violence. Along the model of parts of the Florida coast, for example? Whether a jewelled gated community is the best future for America and the rest of the world is another question.
Yet the city has a unique beauty to it, and beauty occasionally needs to locate itself on the edge. Certainly a restricted and enforced beauty has no meaning.
So, a lot to think about, a lot to put into Shane's movie, and a lot to be talked about, then a lot more to be done.
Today i watched all our rushes, so these themes are right in the front of my head again. I hope and believe the trip was as important for us all. We start editing on Tuesday. Stay tuned.