Disappearing Culture

I want to give you some reflections on my area more than two years after Hurricane Katrina took away much of it, reflections on the impact of the loss of not only buildings and people but the culture of New Orleans. The culture of an area and a people is what defines a great deal of identity to it and them. Like your city and all others, New Orleans has a microscopic perspective of culture. That is, we see our culture as being what is immediately around us (in the city itself) not as being defined by the larger area (the nation or world).
The culture of an area for most people is what the people eat, their language and dialect, the institutions they are committed to, the kinds of people they interact with, the familiar buildings and favored spots of their city, the habits they learn when growing up in the city, in others words....what we are used to. But here much of that is now gone. It's not just the physical things but the psychological losses that tear apart a culture, as Hurricane Katrina did here. We now have an emotionally wounded population desperately searching for a lost cultural that will largely never reappear and can never be found. As a result the population is in psychological stress.
When we lose the favored restaurant, church, school or any tradition or physical manifestation, that is a component that we have relied on for so long to define us, it is almost like losing a family member or a part of one's own identity. I could name many things I liked about New Orleans that were wiped away forever by the hurricane, but you get the idea and it isn't necessary to name names. Suffice to say that when a community loses too much of it's identity too suddenly, as in a big hurricane that floods 70% of the city, it leaves the person and community injured forever.
And when the culture changes so quickly, as in the aftermath of the storm, it is impossible to accept the cultural changes that happen. For instance, in normal times, if my favorite Mardi Gras parade no longer existed it would be not so bad because others are still present to parade. That keeps me in the culture. But when a catastrophic storm wipes way a large number of them I am left to feel as if Mardi Gras has been unfairly taken away rather than has disappeared naturally over time (all specific cultural institutions do eventually die, I understand that).
When evolution takes away the culture gradually, the person is a little bitter at first, but adjusts to the loss by immersing him or herself in what remains of the culture. But the mammoth destruction of the culture by the hurricane has left us permanently bitter, because we never had the opportunity to see those cultural icons disappear "normally". We had no time to adjust to the instant loss of so many. I guess this is hard for you to understand because you have not had your culture suddenly destroyed. But this is what most people here feel now.
I make a distinction between having the culture stolen, as by the hurricane, and that which is lost because the person moved away or decided to live in another culture. The first loss is a case of theft, the second is by choice....and one can always return to the culture he or she gives up voluntarily, but we will never see much of what was destroyed by Katrina. It is gone forever.
So now I am ambivalent about living in New Orleans. I have trouble understanding what the place is now about, given so much of it is gone. It changed too fast and what is replacing the lost parts is nothing more than the common culture of the U.S. That just won't do for New Orleanians because we are people who have had a distinct and unique cultural identification for all of our existence. The King (New Orleans) is dead, but I do not want a new King to take his place, for he is not one I can ever recognize or ever love.