“The five hundred darkies” in this courthouse can’t be fed, and the place smells like a slaughter-pen,” the sheriff of Greenville, Mississippi, reported to Will Percy during the Great Flood of 1927. When the Mississippi River flooded Greenville, the mayor put Will Percy, the 42-year-old cousin of novelist Walker Percy, in charge of the Flood Relief Committee and the localRed Cross. Percy commandeered bootleggers’ motorboats to rescue residents from their rooftops. The next order of business was confiscating every bit of food and every form of transportation to head off looting and burglary.

It was down-home martial law, and by Percy’s account in his 1941 book, Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son, it worked. That is, except for Percy’s attempt to evacuate the African-Americans who had been pressed into service to shore up the levees, which was sabotaged by other white planters. The black laborers watched from shore as mostly empty relief boats carried 33 whites out of harm’s way.

Plus çe que la change, as they say.Many people are grateful they saw New Orleans before the deluge. Pompeii comes to mind. I have been grateful, too, and angry, worried and unutterably sad, thinking about the time I lived half a block away from a café called Rue de la Course on Magazine Street — a coffee shop where the baristas discussed epistemology and nervous breakdowns with equal aplomb.

I wanted to write today about the people dying in New Orleans, and why they are dying. I wanted to write about bayous where dark eagles rise like smoke in the air and egrets circle the oil rigs as if rusted iron and slick petroleum were their natural habitat. I wanted to write about the destruction of one million acres of wetlands, first by levee construction on the Mississippi after the Great Flood of 1927, and then by the damage done when oil companies dredged canals to haul in oil from the Gulf of Mexico, and how all of this left New Orleans without a natural buffer that could have stopped this hurricane from killing so many people and destroying so much architecture.

But it’s impossible not to think about Cedric. I met Cedric at the Rue de la Course the morning after I got to town. He was sitting at one of the outside tables, a black man with a grim visage who looked one f-stop above homeless. We chatted, but I remember eyeing him cautiously and wondering if I’d ever see him again in the neighborhood, and under what circumstances.

About a week later, he showed up at my apartment — hired off the street by the New York mover who’d arrived with my stuff. He introduced himself and called me “Miss Susan,” which shocked me, because I wasn’t used to this Southern habit. It became quickly apparent that Cedric couldn’t read — not even the numbers on the boxes we were checking against a list. He told me, though, that he could read the Bible, “the whole Bible.”Someone who knew about such things told me that Cedric couldn’t actually read the Bible, but that he’d memorized it.

That fall, I volunteered for an adult literacy program, but the program fell apart when the Bush administration cut its funding.

Cedric lived a couple of blocks away. When we were done with the moving, I told him I hoped I’d see him again. I went back to the café many times after that, but I never did see Cedric.

The Garden District didn’t get the worst of Katrina, so I’m hoping he’s still alive.There are a lot of stories about the administration’s refusal to adequately fund reconstruction of the levees and restore the coastal wetlands. But much human suffering also could have been avoided if the class and race divisions of New Orleans weren’t so ossified. No one is talking about this realistically or sensitively enough. Doing justice to New Orleans starts with schools. The illiteracy rate in New Orleans is between 38 percent and 60 percent. That’s roughly the same as the Sudan. The oil companies say they don’t hire blacks because they’re not well-educated. If more African-Americans in Louisiana had jobs, they’d own cars. And if they owned cars, more of them would be alive today.It’s a vicious cycle. A Sierra Club study showed that doing away with state tax breaks given to the petroleum industry could go a long way toward adequately funding schools in Louisiana. But oil is the state religion, and that study was submerged like so many of the bodies trapped in houses in the 9th Ward.The greatest irony of Hurricane Katrina, perhaps the only one, came when Kofi Annan offered flood-relief assistance to the United States as if it were a Third World country.

A few years ago, an environmentalist with the Coalition To Restore Coastal Louisiana managed to get an audience with a bank president named R. King Milling. This white-haired patriarch once was a successful oil and gas lawyer, and, even more notably, he’d been king of Mardi Gras. The environmentalist, a guy named Mark Davis, explained to Milling that one million acres of the swamps south of New Orleans — one-fourth of the wetlands that existed before European settlement — had already been lost. Every year, 25 square miles of wetlands, an amount totaling the size of Manhattan, were dropping into the Gulf of Mexico.

That wasn’t good for the oil business. Thirty percent of our domestic crude oil production comes from the Gulf of Mexico, nearly all of it pushed up pipelines and canals through the coastal wetlands to Port Fourchon. As the wetlands falls away, pipelines are exposed to the vagaries of open water.

Because this was New Orleans, Milling wasn’t a nouveau riche who would simply pull up stakes and move the operation to Nigeria. Three years ago, Milling became chair of the Governor’s Advisory Commission on Coastal Restoration and Conservation. He rounded up his friends to support the cause of restoring the bayous. Those friends included everyone from Shell Oil to the Tabasco company. With strong support from Louisiana Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, they have been lobbying for federal funding to restore coastal Louisiana.

Restoring the wetlands of Louisiana is estimated to cost $14 billion, almost twice as much as the similar effort now under way in the Everglades.People in Louisiana have always understood the connections between the natural and the constructed world; perhaps now others may, too.

What made me cry when I looked at the news wasn’t coastal wetland erosion; it was the faces of people like Cedric. But restoring coastal Louisiana is as much part of the equation as reducing poverty. I remember the odd stillness of the cypress swamps, the startling sight of eagles and the ubiquity of water in Louisiana as much as I remember anything else about the place. Water is the ground you fall through here; it is everywhere, shooting past you on the causeways, surrounding you like breath.

Louisiana may be even richer biologically than the Everglades, which accounts for its resilience in the face of such depredation. Coastal Louisiana is first in oyster and shrimp production, and also provides one third of the nation’s fish. It’s also the country’s second largest avian flyway after the Pacific flyway.

Earlier this year, over the president’s protests, Congress included in an energy bill a provision that would give Louisiana about $135 million a year to restore coastal wetlands. Sidney Coffee, the Louisiana director of the America’s Wetlands campaign and a former aide to Governor Blanco, says not only is this inadequate; it’s unfair. Louisiana’s royalties to the federal government from offshore drilling average $5 billion a year. Since the deficit-happy Reagan era, these royalties, which by law were supposed to go to the Land and Water Conservation Fund, have been funneled into federal general funds instead.

“Wyoming and New Mexico get 50 percent paid directly back to them on oil and gas,” said Coffee. “We want only a tiny portion of that so we can address this problem.

“What happens on this coast is huge,” Coffee added. “It has huge, huge implications for the rest of the nation. This isn’t just an environmental story. That’s what’s changed. This is a huge economic and security issue. You just can’t separate it anymore.”

This is only the beginning of a storm cycle predicted to last nearly half a century. Hurricane Katrina may not have bankrupted the entire country, but what about the next time? And the next? The Enlightenment itself began in disaster, when an earthquake decimated Lisbon in 1755, calling into question notions of an all-powerful god. This hurricane has stripped away our illusions, too, laying bare the bones of our affluence. Businessmen like Milling know the bill for our way of life is coming due, and they’re realistic enough to accept that it’s time to pay up — especially if most of the money comes from the federal government.

“Nature Bats Last,” reads a radical-environmentalist bumper sticker. It did, and New Orleans lost. The winds changed, as Randy Newman wrote in “Louisiana 1927,” one of his many prescient songs about America, and one can only hope they will again, before the waters come back to haunt us.

This was a wake-up call to me about the anger that’s out there, and I believe it’s directly related to Arizona’s dire economic circumstances.  I send my appreciation to the many good people who are struggling in this economy.  I see you every day.   I’m one of you.  This strengthened my resolve to document your stories in the series Annals of the New Poverty.

I was sitting at a Starbucks in Tucson when suddenly I felt my heart beating faster than normal. It wasn’t the caffeine. I had looked up from my iPhone and noticed two young men with buzz cuts, heavy-metal T-shirts, and backpacks. Something about their posture, slouching but with a coiled energy, made me think they were angry. I wondered what was in their backpacks. I wondered if I was safe.

I had worried about getting mugged or having my house broken into, but I had never before worried about a random act of violence. Like many Tucsonans, I cried when former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords walked onto the stage at the Democratic convention last month. I hadn’t expected to. I thought I had gotten over the shock that followed her shooting by a young man whose alienation made him blind to the humanity of others. But I hadn’t, and I suspect that we – not only people in Tucson, but also people throughout America -continue to wonder about the nexus of politics, stress and the human soul.

If anything good comes out of the events of Jan. 8, 2011, it will be the discussion of civility. Initially, I’ll admit I was dubious. As a reporter, I’ve been subjected to years of carefully crafted sound bites designed to gloss over the truth, or subvert it. I enjoy watching Bill Maher, and I doubted that civility was the first word that would come to anyone’s mind about his barbed commentaries, or, frankly, mine, especially when I was in my roaring 20s (and 30s). I thought of civility as ladies drinking tea and making small talk.

After I watched both political conventions, and saw the news that followed them, particularly the riots and murder in Libya over two culture’s vastly different ideas about reverence and free speech, finding a definition of civility began to seem important.

The root of the word civility is the Greek word civis, the city.  According to P.M. Forni, a professor of Italian literature at Johns Hopkins University, and founder of the Civility Project:

The etymology of ‘civility’ rests in one of the Latin words for ‘city’ — not the city of mortar and stone but the city of flesh and blood, the body politic, the state, the community. The word is ‘civitas,’ which is the same word that gives us ‘civilization.’

In the 14th century, the word civility became more individualized, taking on the meaning “status of a citizen.” Civil behavior was understood as that which is proper to a citizen.

The Founding Fathers drew on historic notions of civility. While most of these men were well-read in the classics, there were also lessons early in life. By age 16, George Washington had copied by hand, “110 Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation,” a set of dos and don’ts based on rules inscribed by French Jesuits in 1595. The rules range from the trivial – exhortations not to spit in the fire – to the profound: “Every Action done in Company, ought to be with Some Sign of Respect, to those that are Present.”

The rules so laboriously copied by Washington have a common theme: acknowledging the humanity of others. But when you don’t see someone’s face, that’s harder to do. The Internet has connected us in ways that seem almost miraculous. People in Mali, or Syria, or New Orleans tells us when a famine or war or natural disaster is occurring. They can even give us map coordinates to tell us where help is needed most. We raise funds for hungry people, or sick children, or presidential elections. But the ease and impersonality of online life has its pitfalls: we can get addicted to pornography, gambling, or, in my case, real estate listings. We’ve all sent those inflammatory, late night emails and regretted it later.

If civility is going to be reintroduced to the public sphere, it is first necessary to be clear on what it isn’t. Civility is not blandness, sound-bite journalism, or Orwellian double speak. Civility is, in fact, the antidote to those things. In his book, “Civility: A Cultural History,” Canadian sociology professor Benet Davetian defines civility as trust in the social bonds that connect us, no matter how rugged our individualism. That trust is based on a reasonable amount of confidence that our actions are congruent with our stated beliefs.

I wonder sometimes if the eruptions of incivility – former GE head Jack Welch’s remark that his successor Jeff Immelt was “getting his ass kicked,” Yahoo bureau chief David Chalian’s overheard remarks at the Republican convention (“They’re happy to have a party with black people drowning!”), even Howard Dean’s ill-fated rebel yell in the 2004 election – are, in part, a reaction to the tightly controlled, manipulative, and at times, utterly dishonest discourse of contemporary American politics.

Civility requires a commitment to truth, as well as compassion. Like a dysfunctional family, a society that fosters disingenuousness and punishes directness will not be able to make good decisions, or move toward a productive future. As Thomas Jefferson said, in his famous quote on freedom of speech, “Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.” But Jefferson never watched television advertising, and the public relations industry had not been invented in 1789. Even Jefferson couldn’t anticipate how powerless reason becomes in the face of relentless emotional appeals and psychological manipulation.

In the United States, thankfully, we still have the right to free speech. But in practice, neither free speech nor civility is simple. If you want proof, look at the reason Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s are skeptical about U.S. bonds: political gridlock. The true challenge of the 21st century may not be rebuilding our economy – that’s the kind of thing we’ve always been good at – but rebuilding the way we talk to each other.

One day I wore the shirt to the Museum of Modern Art. A guy with very open and intense brown eyes and a halo of longish, wiry hair stared at me, and smiled. Even at fourteen, I knew what that smile meant. I hadn’t gotten many of them yet, and that particular man’s smile, the frank, unmediated pleasure in it, felt like standing in a lightning storm with a kite.

It was Abbie Hoffman.

A decade later, I was in the audience at Columbia University when a burned out Abbie Hoffman, his face almost unrecognizable from the plastic surgery he’d gotten when he was on the run from a cocaine bust, told us he’d changed his mind.

“Remember how we used to say, ‘Don’t trust anyone over thirty?’” he asked. “Now I say: Don’t trust anyone under thirty.”

I was nearing twenty-five, still young enough to be righteous, and righteously pissed off. Disappointed, too, and that was worse. Women don’t like being disappointed in men, and we definitely don’t want to be disappointed in the author of Steal This Book and Revolution for the Hell of It. We don’t want to hear the bitterness. Not when we’re twenty-five.

Only now I’m feeling the same way. I just had coffee with a friend of mine, a professor of creative writing. We talked about one of our mutual friends, another woman who writes both fiction and non-fiction that draws on her experience as a former heroin addict, and the warmth she’s felt from husband’s Latino family. For twenty years, she’s been doing heavy lifting, in the academic sense, teaching composition to undergraduates at the university where we all have either studied or taught. She was turned down recently for a creative writing job in favor of a trendier writer.

“She earned that job,” I said.

“I know,” my friend said. “I wanted her. But the younger professors….”

She shook her head.

As Naomi Klein recently told Bill Moyers, when people are worried about basic necessities, like health, education, even shelter, it’s difficult to have compassion.

“It’s good for the department,” I’m sure the young professors said as they rejected our friend.

We decry corporations for throwing employees out of work, but I wonder if people who came of age during the Wall Street go-go years have unconsciously replicated that heartless ethos. Have we forgotten how to reward someone’s service, value their kindness to students, their warm relationships with colleagues? It’s been at least twenty years since magazines published stories because of their intrinsic value to society. If there’s a serious point to a story, you usually have to sneak it in, like a parent putting cold medicine into peanut butter for a recalcitrant child.

What, exactly, is our definition of friendship? In a recent column for Real Simple, the magazine that makes people feel good about consumerism, etiquette columnist Michelle Slatalla advised readers about how to handle the situation when a friend is “oversharing” about debts or money troubles.

“Say, ‘I’m sorry you’re going through hard times.  If you need advice, I’d be happy to help you find a professional money advisor.’”

All I can say is that I’m happy that Michelle Slatalla is no friend of mine.  Someone who is a friend, a female political consultant who’s out of work herself, recently sent money to a friend of hers – a writer in L.A. who needed an infusion of cash to pay her rent.

Doesn’t that sound more like friendship?

In the recent film Cosmopolis, based on a Don DeLillo novel, time is speeded up until it is a glittering machine of death, not unlike the protagonist’s stretch limo. (The young master of the universe is played by Robert Pattinson, an inspired choice.) We live so far beyond the Industrial Revolution’s clock time I wonder if we are, for all intents and purposes no longer human, not unlike the sleek vampire played by Pattinson in the Twilight movies. If we stay busy enough, perhaps we can convince ourselves that nothing has changed.  

In poorer countries, where people often lack faith in institutions, they depend on one another.  Here in the U.S., our belief in self-reliance may prevent us from establishing that kind of informal economy, so more and more people will have nowhere to turn.

I understand Abbie Hoffman’s bitterness, and his decline. I hate to bring them down, these children of the 80s and 90s, adults now, handsome, intelligent, so sharp and ironic. You were all born waayyyy after the cutoff date for Social Security and Medicare going broke, I want to say. What was that old Hollywood maxim my mother used to rattle off in her show biz fag hag days in the 70s? Something about being nice to people on your way up, because you’ll be seeing them again on your way down?

But I don’t. I don’t. Let Abbie rest, I tell myself. Take a breath. He’s dead. You’re still alive. You’re still here, in this world, the way we live now.

Oops.  Yahoo fired Chalian, and media types were regaled with the usual salvos of self-righteousness from our colleagues.

The only thing that’s truly notable about this incident is how swiftly and self-righteously Americans punish anyone for speech that falls outside the boundaries of bland, pre-packaged sound bites.  Whether it’s Howard Dean’s rebel yell, or Barack Obama saying “When you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody” (as if that’s somehow an ignoble sentiment) the nation reacts swiftly to anyone who might dare to actually….tell the truth.  And the truth is often best expressed by satire, as Jonathan Swift knew.  That lesson never made it across the Atlantic, apparently; instead we got Rupert Murdoch.

The real outrage is the self-referential superficiality of the media.  Compare Chalian’s comment to this remark by a well-coiffed CNN commentator:  “That’s great TV.”

This is Journalism 2012.  The problem is that the comment scans for most TV-watchers as an endorsement of the Republicans.  Great TV.  What higher compliment is there, after all?

I’m not saying that Chalian shouldn’t have been reprimanded for getting a little overexcited and forgetting that he might be overheard.  But reporters are supposed to be advocates for the people who get a raw deal.  The way things are now, if you’re not outraged, you shouldn’t be doing the job.  I wonder at the comments like this one, from an editor friend who runs a decent but decidedly non-controversial publication in Washington DC:

“He should apologize to the American public, which already holds journalists in such low esteem.”

Really?  Journalists have a lot to apologize for, but Chalian’s remark strikes me as pretty low on the list.  People disenchanted with journalists because they perceive that we’re dishonest.  They’re right.  The tsunami of coverage emanating from the Republican convention is white noise at best, and destructive idiocy at worst.

What emerges from the yada yada yada are the powerful images of people whose homes were destroyed by Hurricane Isaac – and yes, many of them did seem to be black, what a surprise — juxtaposed with the chirpy coverage of the convention.

It’s time to stop pretending that anything is “objective.”  The American public knows better.  The only ones still in denial are reporters.  It’s time to stop giving journalists a pass on analytical thinking.  Chalian’s pointed remark will live on as a meme long after the unmemorable remarks by his colleagues who still have their jobs.

Onward to the Democrats.

I am convinced that Ward Just is God: all-seeing, all-knowing, or at least brilliant, not to mention prescient.  Contemporary reverbs galore in A Family Trust, a 1978 novel about the pillaging of small town America by developers and the passing of the newspaper industry.

Thinking of the Drudge Report while reading the old man editor and publisher’s dismay at TV: “Unedited news was a calamity, for without editing a reader had no context by which to judge it, and no means of knowing its truth of falsehood or durability. An unedited newspaper was a delusion, a carnival sideshow of freaks and shell games, all of it chaotic and hysterical.”

But the passage I love most is this one:

“She believed that books were noble, even imperfect books. They disclosed what they had to disclose, at cost and at pain. The more the cost and greater the pain the finer the book.  She believed it as an article of faith: nothing should be withheld.”