Because the premise of the rhetorical question is so blatantly obvious, it challenges me to try to come up with some even remotely plausible reason to deny it. So I wonder, is there any possible benefit for a group of cooperative animals to stop cooperating?
What comes up for me is the model of cancer. With cancer, we have a bunch of cells that are behaving like greedy little pigs. They are hogging all the resources and dividing at a super-rapid rate. In this way, they are harming the entire being and could cause the death of the animal.
So let’s use this as a model and suggest that New Orleans is like a cancer on America. Is there any possible way we can justify this?
As it happens, there is. New Orleans was built on land that is disaster prone. If we continue to live there, we can expect disasters to hit on a regular basis. The land is beneath sea level and only stays dry due to a series of berms and levees.
While it was a strategic location to build on—on the river and near the Gulf, it was asking for trouble to build there. Floods can come from two directions—upriver and from the Gulf. Because of this, maintaining a city in this area will always demand more resources than most other cities.
Right now, no one has a choice in this. The rest of the country is paying for New Orleans because New Orleanians decided to live there, not because we decided it was worth it to us to support them in living there. Yet we keep on supporting them because people argue that we must maintain the city. Why?
Well, there are many good reasons. Besides its strategic significance, it has enormous cultural significance. It is the home of incredible music. It has a French heritage shared only by a few other urban areas nearby (Baton Rouge, e.g.). It is a place that many people want to visit. And perhaps more controversially, it is a repository of African-American culture. It is steeped in the tradition resulting from our history of slavery—a tradition that is still sending breakers that batter at the levees protecting white privilege.
So one would think that white America might want to see Black New Orleans die off. Perhaps white America sees Treme as a cancer; a social cancer growing where the river empties into the ocean.
Blacks, of course, don’t see it this way. Blacks see it as racism that they don’t get their fair share of disaster recovery aid. Blacks in New Orleans don’t see themselves as a cancer.
I don’t see New Orleans as a cancer, either. All I’m saying is that you could make the argument and it wouldn’t be entirely unreasonable. In fact, I do believe that city shouldn’t be there. It’s asking for trouble again and again. But then, the Dutch all live beneath the sea level, and they have ways of protecting themselves, so surely we Americans could find ways to protect New Orleans. Although it would be better if New Orleans paid for it themselves. I’m not saying they don’t, but I don’t know if they self fund all the Army Corp of Engineers projects that protect them.
If they paid for themselves, then I suspect people would be happier about helping them out in a disaster. But if they are being subsidized all the time, then I can see that people might get tired of it, and wonder what’s in it for us to subsidize New Orleans not just in disasters, but all the time.
This is just a thought experiment. I’m just making an argument; but don’t think I believe this.
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