The post-waking-nightmare dream was grandiose. "In March 2007, city officials finally unveiled their plan to redevelop New Orleans and begin the move out of the post-hurricane morass. It was billed as the plan to end all plans, with Paris-like streetscape renderings and promises of parks, playgrounds and 'cranes on the skyline' within months." However, more than a year later, it seems that the dream has not gained much waking-life traction, as reported by Adam Nossiter in his article "Big Plans Are Slow to Bear Fruit in New Orleans" (The New York Times, 01 Apr 08).The harsh reality-check demanded of all dreams tells a disheartening story. "A year after a celebratory City Hall kickoff, there have been no cranes and no Parisian boulevards. A modest paved walking path behind a derelict old market building is held up as a marquee accomplishment of the yet-to-be realized plan."
The nightmarish reality has hardly been touched by the hopes and the plans dreamed a year before. "There has been nothing to signal a transformation in the sea of blight and abandonment that still defines much of the city. Weary and bewildered citizens, forced to bring back the hard-hit city on their own, have searched the plan’s 17 'target recovery zones' for any sign that the city’s promises should not be consigned to the municipal filing cabinet, along with their predecessors. On their one-year anniversary, the designated 'zones' have hardly budged.“
There seems to be a pattern here. "The growing frustration points up what has been a recurring theme in New Orleans’s sketchy, on-again, off-again recovery from Hurricane Katrina: grandiose official promises, apparently made to lift citizen morale, that soon prove unrealistic.“ Disneyesque, pastel-gauze dream offered to block out the unimagineable horror and darkness of the waking nightmare.
The examples of concrete reality that belie the promise of the dream are multitude. "Many of the hardest-hit neighborhoods remain stuck where they have been for months, with a few houses on a block occupied and the rest in varying stages of abandonment or repair.“ And concurrently, "the re-population of the city after the storm that emptied it has slowed notably. The Census Bureau’s latest estimate, 239,000, represents barely over half the former population – and well under what local officials and new Orleans demographers have been claiming for months.“
The goals dreamed of have, it seems, barely moved beyond computerized hopes. "In the city’s renewal plan, most of the 17 redevelopment areas still bear tentative designations like 'preliminary design' or 'planning' on a municipal Web site that officials say is up to date. In some areas, no development projects are indicated at all, and on the few that indicate 'construction', actual results seem small-scale – new paving on a basketball court and a new corrugated metal roof over it, in an otherwise forlorn playground, next to an empty, boarded-up school, in a neighborhood, Hoffman Triangle, full of abandoned houses and teenagers hanging out at midday.“
Dreams, be they goals and aspirations, be they ideals, be they hope, are of little value until they are made real. In order to be concretized, all dreams must regularly and ongoingly verified in the waking world to see how they are growing. Dreams need constant tending and weeding, otherwise they all too quickly become nightmares.