Cheryl Wagner opened this discussion by soliciting comments about rebuilding a culture. Her frame of reference is New Orleans, where physical rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina is evident-but-oh-so-slow. The languid pace is gradually covering up scars caused by the massive man-made natural disaster caused by defective levees. The mental rebuilding, however, is not so good. Homeless and hungry people, hopeless people, crime victims-all still praying that the trauma they've endured for almost four years will go away. They are the people who inhabit Cheryl Wagner's book, Plenty Enough Suck to Go Around, but they don't just live within the book's pages. They can be found in 2009.

When a city is hit hard and brought to its knees, rebuilding a culture rarely is a top priority. Residents of New Orleans were left to their own devices to survive the disaster and stay sane. As New Orleanians found out, survival can never be assumed; and sanity, precarious in the best of circumstances, proves elusive.

The people I know are fighting back. They are working hard. Sometimes it takes all their effort to face another day. They have not experienced the "post" in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) because their stress has not stopped since August 29, 2005. The horrors are still of the present-tense variety.

What of the widow whose contractor stole more than $50,000 from her and vanished, leaving behind a deranged arrangement of renovated confusion that had to be repaired again? She is going to court in a few weeks just hoping for a slim chance at justice. She has fought battle after battle after battle to return to her home. She's been fighting for almost four years.

Several federal and state agencies were set up to help flood victims, and it seems that these agencies also set up a firewall just so that they wouldn't have to help flood victims. Didja hear the one about the elderly jazz musician who tried and tried to break through the barrier, and just when he finally reached the flood officials, his cell phone died, and he could not get them back on the phone? He has complained of severe headaches for four years.

It reminds me of the quote in Wagner's book: "Can't you just call them?" one person asks Jake, as if picking up the telephone was the one obvious thing he forgot to do to recover from the storm. Maybe in other parts of the world it makes sense to use a telephone to call a government office. After Katrina, flood victims' phones were routed through hell.

Elderly public school teachers, who trained generations of New Orleans musicians, should be greeting their former students on the streets of New Orleans. They should be singing together in New Orleans churches or chatting leisurely in New Orleans beauty parlors. These guardians of the culture were too advanced in years and their retirement pensions too small to rebuild their homes, so they have had to accept their sad exile in faraway states.

A young Mardi Gras Indian Chief returns to New Orleans every other year to bring out his gang, but he has to be back in Dallas the next day to go to work, and his children are drifting away from the tradition-a tradition of strength and resistance that made his life make sense in New Orleans.

The cantankerous T.S. Eliot once said that "culture may even be described simply as that which makes life worth living." There are still plenty of people in New Orleans who work hard every day, and they are determined to celebrate the joy they work so hard keep alive-despite the unrelenting trauma.

Yes. It has been almost four years, and the trauma persists. In Wagner's book, Jake said it best: "...I want this shit over with."