Quo Vado?

I’ll admit to being kind of clueless about many things. I’ll even admit that my practical + lazy attitudes sometimes equate to not understanding why others put in the effort. What I don’t get is why some people living in the Katrina disaster zone feel the need to urge others back to the area.

NPR recently ran a story on Alden McDonald Jr. and how his choice to trust the account holders in the aftermath of the hurricane has helped to fund the rebuilding of the city and those who landed in far flung places. The end of the story reveals McDonald’s future plans.

“McDonald has a plan to contact every single resident on a street, find out what they need to come home, then tap a risk pool and get them the money to rebuild.”

Why does he assume that these people want to come back? How does the horror of the flooding not rip the label of home from the land? The houses in question can be rebuilt; but, after five years nothing in them is salvagable. In modern urban locations our ties to the land are limited by our lack of contact with it. We don’t build our own homes. We don’t grow our own crops.

If it was me, and it was five years after the disaster and I’d not yet chosen to return to the site of my home, I don’t know that I’d ever go back to do much more than visit. It’s a place of memories the present can never come close to matching. I would have worked hard to make a new home. I doubt I could bring myself to move back to a place where the threat of a repeat disaster looms so solidly in the future.