On the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, I went back to the archives and found this post from September 2005, when there were many posts about that terrible, terrible disaster. I often run old posts in color.

New Orleans has always been so vivid in my imagination. it is a place I always wanted to visit.

The birthplace of jazz, it is rife with stories of musical greats
like Buddy Bolden, Bix Biederbecke and Louis Armstrong. As the daughter
of a jazz afficianado, I’ve felt a kinship with that place where jazz
was born, where the music took seed and blossomed lusciously.

To read and see pictures of what is going on in New Orleans hurts. Reading this in the Times caused me to feel despair as well.

Despair, privation and violent lawlessness grew
so extreme in New Orleans on Thursday that the flooded city’s mayor
issued a "desperate S O S" and other local officials, describing the
security situation as horrific, lambasted the federal government as
responding too slowly to the disaster.

How
is it that our government can’t figure out how to help the people of
New Orleans?  It is horrendous that people haven’t been moved out of
the squalor of the convention center and the Superdome. The misery of
the people is almost too much to bear. They need sanitary conditions,
water, food, and safe housing. The so-called rescue effort is an
absolute disgrace. Our government acts so high and mighty fighting
unnecessary wars on foreign lands when we  have a refugee population in
our own country that truly needs help. NOW.

I read somewhere that New Orleans has seen more death
than most other American
cities, perhaps because it predates them, because disease, floods, storms
and war have ravaged
the city since its beginning, in the early 1700s.

But it is also a mythical place of the imagination and American
music and literature would be lost without it. New Orleans is the city
of Stanley and Stella. Of The Glass Menagerie. Of William Faulkner,
Lillian Hellman, Tennessese Williams and so many others.

These new images in the daily newspapers and on the news are such a
stark contrast to the magical ones in my head. So tragic. So hard to
see. Hundreds of thousands of people in dispair, in unhealthy
conditions, homeless now.

We must do everything we can to alleviate the suffering of our
neighbors in New Orleans. MoveOn.org just announced that it has set up
a Web-based hurricane housing service to
match people who have space to spare with Katrina survivors in need of
housing.