Three incidents provide background for my thoughts on New Orleans.

The most recent is that, shops all around the City of New Orleans have begun giving away laminated bookmarks that exhort us all, to “[B]e a New Orleanian wherever you are.”

Another is that a recent acquaintance pointed out to me during his brief visit to New Orleans that someone we knew in common –  he wouldn't say who –  had remarked in surprise and disbelief, “Brenda Marie Osbey wants everybody to go back to New Orleans.”

Somewhat earlier, at a symposium at NYU, someone asked me, “How can you ask Black people to return to a city that has treated them so badly?”

For myself, I have no delusions about the aims of city, state or federal government.

What I do know is that none of us wants to lose people, homes, culture and the institutions that have grown slowly, and sometimes painfully, throughout our history to the tune of state and federally-funded bulldozers.

I am and have always been in favor of as much green space as possible everywhere that it is possible. Consider that New Orleans is historically and geographically an evergreen City, crowded with live oak, palm, magnolia, majestic pine and tropical and subtropical fruit-bearing trees. Jasmine and roses bloom throughout the year. Mosses, ferns and trees grow from the merest cracks in cement and between the brick and mortar of our old buildings. And the black soil is so rich that anything can be grown in the very heart of the City.

As much as I love our dense subtropical overgrowth, however, I will never be in favor of any development that would replace historically significant and culturally viable communities with golf courses and amusement parks. If levees can be rebuilt to protect homes in Lakeview and the golf courses, amusement and theme parks which the old-line developers have proposed to replace 9^th Ward homes and business, then they can be rebuilt to protect 9^th Ward residents and their homes.

What we must keep in mind is that, while this is indeed the worst natural disaster in the history of the nation, the death and devastation suffered is not the fault of Nature, but of gross and unpardonable human error. And that that human error is itself not the result of lack of knowledge and information on the part of either the Army Corps of Engineers or government officials at every level, but of political budgetary corner-cutting, mismanagement and a thorough-going absence of human compassion.

My own position hasn’t changed. The City was here long before any of us. And will remain long after. What is important to me, as a native and a citizen, is that we not confuse city government – and its apparent failures –  with the City, her people and our undeniable, irrepressible Spirit and resilience.

I insist, therefore, that is not enough merely to rebuild the physical structures of New Orleans. New Orleanians ourselves must return to reclaim the City. No one I know or love or respect wants to live in the kinds of theme park caricatures of New Orleans proposed by the countless developers who, less than two weeks after the hurricanes struck, descended upon the City. The City cannot be shaped without her citizens. And whatever agency eventually serves to oversee hurricane/ flood management and protection – whether generated by local or state government, whether initially funded by the feds, or as a joint public-private sector cooperative – must include a community oversight component.

For those who can not or care not to return, the bookmark is more eloquent than I could hope to be: Be a New Orleanian wherever you are. And for all of us, wherever we land, one thing more of which I am absolutely certain. There is no City without the people. The City is us.