Our Begining and Ending

If the beginning of wisdom is in realizing that one knows nothing, then the beginning of understanding is in realizing that all things exist in accord with a single truth: large things are made of smaller things.

So it is with the growth of plants that spring from seeds, as well as with walls built from many stones. So it is with mankind, as the customs and traditions of our ancestors blend together to form the foundation for our own cities, history, and way of life. 

Large things are made from small things.
Significance is cumulative-but not always obvious.

 - Author Jim Butcher

Over the past few years, our community is always a hot topic when it comes to using money on levee protection.    And recently we have lost our battle for what we had hoped to be a solution to some of our flooding problems.  For years, Mayor Kerner has lobbied officials in Washington, D.C., and Baton Rouge to include Jean Lafitte, Lafitte, Barataria and Crown Point in the billion-dollar federal project known as Donaldsonville to the Gulf that would have provided storm surge protection for us, but to no avail, the Army Corps of Engineers scrapped all five alternates for the project, saying the "costs outweighed the benefits".   Somehow the last part of the sentence always makes me feel like a second class citizen in a third world country. 

I think that you will find that no one could pay us enough money to move from here. We flood because of man made problems, so man should fix them!  The oil and lumber companies that built south Louisiana messed up the coast, so they should have been responsible.  We were here long before anyone else in the New Orleans metro area. We didn't just decide to build on a flood plain, our ansestors were here for hundreds of years building and making our wonderful community what it is today.  "Large things are made from small things.  Significance is cumulative-but not always obvious."  The larger cities of South Louisiana were made from the wonderfully smaller communities like Lafitte.


Doesn't anyone see that when we're gone Marrero, Westwego, and Harvey are next as you can see from the picture above. Lake Salvador will be running alongside the Westbank Expressway if nothing is done. 

Yes we choose to live here, so we will keep on fighting to save what we love. Lafitte is not just a physical place to us, it is a place of peace, generousity, and family. A place built from generations of love and kindness. 

It is and always will be our beginning and ending no matter what comes.