"My god, I can't wait for Mardi Gras. I am so homesick. Hearing about these holdouts gives me so much hope."

I just wanted to break out one of the comments from yesterday's post about the holdouts in New Orleans. The post is written by one of our regular commenters, Elizabeth. She's an English and Women's Studies instructor from New Orleans, who left before the storm:

Ann, a message posted late Saturday night by one of the holdouts who has been helping organize rescuers and information, said she was "sitting in Johnny White's drinking a COLD Abita Amber [a favorite local brew any Wisconsite would enjoy], thanks to Eddie Compass!!" Compass is our Chief of Police, so that tells me there is some negotiating going on.

...[T]he corrupt cops are the exceptions. The NOPD ranks have worked this storm, and the days after, away from the families, in sometimes terrifying and frequently sorrowful circumstances, and they keep showing up, day after day. I've heard this from people on the ground, nurses still in the city, and others who owe their lives to the cops.

Those of us who left are going through cycles of what we can think about and talk about. We're starting to talk about how the rebuilding will happen. For many, there's a feeling of distrust; we don't want the type of help the government gave in the storm--let's not debate that here, the point is to understand that New Orleanians are very suspect of outside planners. We want to guard our historic homes, and not have developers with U.S. contracts come in and slap up pre-fab, cookie cutter houses. We want to plan how we can make use of this awful event to sweep away some of the poverty and corruption, to fix our schools from the ground up, not piecemeal. And we want our people, our contractors and bricklayers and ironworkers and trash haulers, to do this work, not just contractors with big connections. We have to be part of this; we're getting very tired of waiting to be let in to our homes.

So, my answer to Ann is yes, resoundingly, the government needs to work with the Red Shirts, with the holdouts, and with all of us who are ready to return. My god, I can't wait for Mardi Gras. I am so homesick. Hearing about these holdouts gives me so much hope.