The city of New Orleans showed America what it takes to rebuild a great place. We're all going together, and we're not leaving anybody behind.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes collective efforts and inclusivity in rebuilding communities after crises.
Mitch Landrieu's quote reflects on the strength of unity and collaboration in the face of adversity, specifically highlighting the example of New Orleans. It conveys an inspiring message about the determination to rebuild a city while ensuring that no one is left out of the recovery process, underlining the values of community, support, and resilience.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about community service efforts.
There is nothing here that's broken that can't be fixed, but it won't happen on its own. It's going to require a huge lift by the entire country of the United States of America and people on the ground taking personal responsibility for themselves. You cannot take it as a fait accompli that the city's going to come back.
One of the things that's beautiful about New Orleans is how culturally rich we are and how well we have worked together. People call us a gumbo. It's really important that we get focused on the very simple notion that diversity is a strength, it's not a weakness.
Race in America is not a problem you can go over, or around or under. You've got to go through it.
Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.
Either you vegetate and look out a window, or activate and try to effect change.
There is no way you're going to have an event like 9/11 and expect things to remain the same. They killed 3,000 people in New York on that day, and if they could have they would've killed 300,000.
If as the friends of colonization hope, the present and coming generations of our countrymen shall by any means, succeed in freeing our land from the dangerous presence of slavery; and, at the same time, in restoring a captive people to their long-lost father-land, with bright prospects for the future; and this too, so gradually, that neither races nor individuals shall have suffered by the change, it will indeed be a glorious consummation.
Those who can't imagine change reveal the deficits of their imaginations, not the difficulty of change.
The world is no longer against us.
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