Do You Know contributor Jason Berry wrote a powerful op ed piece on New Orleans that ran in the Boston Globe today. Berry is exceptionally good at giving the increasingly frustrated and fed-up New Orleanians an eloquent voice. What exactly is our country doing about this disaster? Does anyone know?

For those of you who don't want to go through the signup process (it's free and not too involved), here's an excerpt:

Entire neighborhoods go dark at night — no power, no people. Those clamoring to return — to demolish or rebuild — cannot. No place to live.
Apathy toward the dying neighborhoods stains the Social Darwinists who run Congress. They wear the masks of prolife Christians. As Nero fiddled while Rome burned, these Jesus-lovers yawn at a city on the rack, their pensions safe in the mammoth debt furnished by the worst US president ever.

and a little more:

The ''target neighborhoods," as Mayor C. Ray Nagin calls those that have rebounded, lie on dry ridges of the sub-sea-level terrain, notably the French Quarter, the Garden District, Algiers, and Uptown, where life is seminormal with stores and restaurants. Drive a few minutes and you'll see mounds of debris, trashed buildings, brown water lines on houses, shattered lives.

It's worth signing up to read the complete piece. Powerful and depressing. Are we going to fix New Orleans? This is one of our country's darker moments, I'm afraid.