Happy 100th birthday President Jimmy Carter, America’s longest living ex-president. Congrats also to Coach James Franklin and the unbeaten No. 7 ranked football team, Coach Katie Schumacher-Cawley and the No. 3 ranked women’s volleyball team, and coach Erica Dambach and the No. 19 ranked women’s soccer team.
In late summer of 2005 Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans. It was the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history and was responsible for more deaths than any other hurricane. Nearly 1,400 people perished and more than a million people were displaced. I was sharing with students how racially biased some media depicted the victims. I noticed that one of the two or three African Americans, we will call him Mr. Walker, was becoming distressed. I asked him what was bothering him. He told us that he was from New Orleans and that he was unable to reach some of his family members. He didn’t know if they were dead or alive. For the rest of the class time I asked him to tell his story.
Mr. Walker was ultimately able to locate all his family. Like most of the city’s residents they had been displaced. Later that year we went to New Orleans with a busload of PSU volunteers. In the past, if your neighbor’s barn burned down, the community gathered to rebuild it. I stayed in NOLA during the spring semester, helping with the rebuilding efforts. It was awful. The Ninth Ward was the worst. The stench of rotting flesh was a constant reminder that some of the dead had not yet been recovered…