I came to New Orleans to speak at the Clinton Global Initiative University conference at Tulane University. President Clinton, along with Bush the Elder, has helped focus an enormous amount of attention and resources on this city. Like everyone else, I’d watched the TV coverage two and a half years ago, shocked by scenes of people chanting, “Help, Help, Help” in the Superdome, and stories of others being chased onto the roofs of their houses by rising floodwaters, waiting for help that too often never came.

But TV distances as much as it connects. You can turn it off, and anything you can turn off doesn’t seem fully real.

Until you get there. My friend Alycia drove me through the lower 9th ward in her four-wheeler, navigating the twisted, pot-holed roads like a pro. It looked basically like abandoned territory, dozens maybe hundreds of blocks of weed-filled vacant lots. Alycia slowed down, pointed out the window at vacant lot after vacant lot and said “Home, home, home, home.” Sure enough, if you looked carefully through the weeds and garbage, you could make out the foundations of what were once houses.

“Holy cow,” I said, suddenly getting it. The people I saw on TV two and a half years ago in the filth of the Superdome … they once lived here. “Where did all these people go?” I asked, absently, stupidly, insultingly.

Alycia just shook her head as if to say, “People who don’t live here just don’t get it.” And she’s right.

But seeing it first-hand at least puts a human face on the familiar litany of statistics. Almost two thousand people dead. Eighty percent of the city under water for an average of fifty-seven days. Four hundred thousand jobs lost. Two hundred and seventy-five thousand homes destroyed.

And a list of intractable problems so long that it gives you a headache. There’s soil contamination, for one, and serious safety problems with some FEMA trailers, for another. And then there’s something that a guy I met called, “the Katrina cough” – a dry heave he said his doctor couldn’t diagnose, but which just got worse and worse for the whole six months he was working in neighborhoods with severe water damage. Finally, he just had to stop. “After a while, you don’t even want to breathe, the cough hurts so much,” he said.

And still, President Scott Cowen of Tulane University, who gave a remarkable afternoon keynote address at the Clinton Global Initiative, said that he’s never been so optimistic about the city. Before Katrina, it had the worst school system in America, serious crime and corruption problems, a profoundly inadequate infrastructure. And now, the city leaders along with common residents are dreaming about what a model 21st century city would look like. What kind of public education system should it have? What kind of health care delivery? And perhaps most daringly, how can all of it be done on an entirely green basis – from working-class parts of town to tourist areas.

“This is the greatest social experiment in America,” President Cowen said.

The key ingredient – civic engagement. While the government response to Katrina was woeful, the citizen response was heroic. People came from all over to volunteer. Some of America’s most creative social entrepreneurs showed up and stayed, excited about the possibility of building a school system, a health care system, a crime-fighting strategy, and all the other dimensions of a great city, essentially from scratch. (On Thursday, I’ll write about some of the faith-based volunteers and social entrepreneurs I met in New Orleans).

And as President Cowen is helping re-think and re-build New Orleans, he is doing the same with Tulane University. Civic engagement is now a serious part of the curriculum at Tulane, and not simply in the form of one-off volunteer projects. It’s a graduation requirement that is receiving the same type of attention as traditional academic subjects.

And if you want a snapshot into the idealism of this generation, consider this: Tulane’s application numbers boomed from 17,000 last year to 34,000 this year. Why? Because there is a strong desire in a large number of young people to make a major contribution to the great issues of our time. And post-storm New Orleans is one of the best places in the world to do that.

Annie Dillard ends An American Childhood with the line, “In New Orleans – if you could get to New Orleans – would the music be loud enough?”

The music is plenty loud on Frenchmen Street, a scene just a few blocks from the French Quarter but a world away.

At The Spotted Cat, a band led by a clarinet player burst forth parade music with a North African flavor, throwing their hands in the air and gleefully shouting “Haaaaaaayyyyyy” on the offbeat. Several dozen people with funky hats and wild shoes danced with abandon outside, myself amongst them (less funky, less wild, equal abandon). The bouncer, a gruff looking black guy in a wheelchair with no legs, supervised the outside-dancing with a knowing air.

Ellis Marsalis – the patriarch of the first family of jazz – was holding court across the street. A reggae band was three doors down. A girl wearing a housewife’s dress was on the porch of the closed coffee shop singing Loretta Lynn songs. Att the Electric Ladyland Tattoo Parlor, a guy with quarter-size holes in his earlobes was cleaning the African mask on the wall with a three-foot feather duster, paying careful attention to each centimeter. I guess he didn’t want the spirit to feel slighted.

I spend a lot of time in meetings these days. My collection of business suits has grown steadily over the past few years. I think about budgets and strategy and staff management. I go home to my wife and my baby son. And then I get up and do it again. It is a life that I love, a life that I thank God for.

But on Frenchmen Street, I visited the other half of my soul: the jazz half. (I remember feeling a little guilty telling Dr. Umar Abdallah, one of American Islam’s most important scholars, that I love jazz. He responded, “Eboo, Islam is jazz). It was a reminder that life has a variety of rhythms and melodies, flows that are not antagonistic to my work-a-day life, but balance it, make it whole.

That’s what New Orleans is about, that’s why it is necessary to America, that’s why we have to bring it back.

There is a sign nailed to a lamppost on the corner of Frenchmen and Royal.

And
Yes
I said
Yes
I will
Yes

Maybe it was a public acceptance of a marriage proposal.

Maybe it was this city making its intentions known to the world.