This is my last article, and then I graduate and presumably enter the “real world.” So here is my lecture to Loyola:

We live in a dying city. If you don’t see that in the faces of classmates, faculty and staff or feel it in the eerie silences surrounding the city, think about what normalcy now means for New Orleans. I know I wasn’t the only one staring out classroom windows wondering why I was learning what dead people think rather than gutting houses or repairing homes. More than a few of us drove by abandoned schools and over-turned automobiles and second-guessed spending thousands of loaned dollars on our own educations.

We live in a dying city whose still-beating heart desperately needs some economic and emotional breath. Our government is not getting the job done, and history, as recent as Halliburton and the war on Iraq, shows that the private companies contracted can’t be trusted. It’s grassroots groups like Catholic Charities, ACORN and Common Ground that are saving this city, and they rely as heavily on inexperienced volunteers as they do donated funds.

Now let’s be honest: We live in a dying city, yet we’re college students in America. We represent a demographic of the most privileged and fortunate individuals in the world; as students we are at leisure, afforded an incredible amount of freedom at a time when our city needs us most. If there is such a thing as personal responsibility, if ever there was a demand for civil service, that time is now, in this city.

New Orleans is not the city it once was. A significant portion of the population has been displaced; the people who lacked the funds to return are not being afforded the opportunity to vote. But we are. We, the students who reside Uptown, who cannot seem to concentrate in class or hand in assignments on time because suddenly it seems like there’s more to life than mere abstraction because last semester the ground was pulled from beneath our feet.

We’re here in this cemetery city either because we need New Orleans or New Orleans needs us. In either case, it doesn’t seem to matter much that on some ideological level, we’re Democrat or Republican, pro-choice or pro-life, for social welfare or the free market. It doesn’t matter because we, as New Orleanians, know that at any time a storm can come and eradicate our ideas, deprive us of our homes and leave us existentially alone, confronting our reactions to the crises at hand. New Orleans has always been a city that laughs, because otherwise it would cry. To celebrate New Orleans, to celebrate life, to celebrate our freedom and privilege, we must, must, must be willing to sacrifice some free time, some homework time, some drinking time or social time and go out to do the dirty work that our buddy Bush seems to have forgotten. We need to do this because otherwise our dying city might just die.