Tribune Columnist Says Chicago Could Use A Hurricane Katrina

By Rachel Cromidas in News on Aug 14, 2015 3:33PM

Let's get at least one thing clear: Hurricane Katrina killed over 1,800 people, left a million more displaced from their homes and utterly ravaged a historic city. Its upcoming ten-year anniversary is cause for somber reflection, first and foremost, and a thoughtful celebration of New Orleans' painstaking rebirth.

The latest Chicago Tribune column on the subject, published Thursday evening, woefully misses the mark on both counts. The backlash against Tribune Editorial Board member Kristen McQueary's column, "In Chicago, Wishing For A Hurricane Katrina," (and later renamed "Chicago, New Orleans, and rebirth") was swift and fierce.

Comparing Chicago's history of political corruption, failing school system and entrenched budgetary problems to pre-Katrina New Orleans, McQueary gets hyperbolic on us:

I find myself wishing for a storm in Chicago — an unpredictable, haughty, devastating swirl of fury. A dramatic levee break. Geysers bursting through manhole covers. A sleeping city, forced onto the rooftops.

That's what it took to hit the reset button in New Orleans. Chaos. Tragedy. Heartbreak.

Whether McQueary, who said she was "praying for a real storm" in a line in the original column that has since been scrubbed from the online story, meant it metaphorically or not, readers from New Orleans and elsewhere were quick to point out that, no, there's no way anyone is wishing for Katrina's devastation to return. A small sampling of the online response via Twitter:
McQueary has published this response via Twitter.

As former Chicagoist editor Marcus Gilmer wrote for us on the 5-year anniversary of the hurricane, there is absolutely nothing to glamorize about the struggles of New Orleans as a city or its displaced citizens as thousands of individuals, scattered across the country, trying to rebuild.

The rebuilding of New Orleans continues and here I am - here we are - 1,000 mile away, with feelings of guilt, sadness, and as if our existence and affair with the city has been scrubbed away like so many of the flood's waterlines. It's a feeling [Jarret Lofstead, instructor at Loyola University New Orleans and Senior Editor at NOLAFugees Press] summed up perfectly when I asked if thought is ever given to those that have left the city: "We don't think about you anymore. But that's always the way it is in New Orleans; you either live here or you don't." Indeed, we don't. And that's something we can't forget.