It is not interesting, it is horrifying ... and exactly what happened after Katrina. After the initial shock, once everyone was off the roofs and out of the Superdome, once the limbs and lines were cleared out of the streets and the trailers moved in, the media turned away to other things - too swiftly. Our media thrives on novelty, on always pursuing the new "breaking" story, and does not do well with sustained coverage of complex issues.

I feared this at the time, wondering if even in the giant media markets of New York the same thing would happen. Sadly, yes it has. The novelty is off and months or years of drudgery remain. Whole neighborhoods will likely never be rebuilt. Insurance companies will decide to curtail their payments and begin challenging claims so that homeowners - having missed their opportunity for federal disaster aid by having insurance - will be left ruined, with no recourse.

Can ALL this happen again? Will we let vast tracks of the New Jersey suburbs of New York rot into ruin like the 9th Ward? Likely so. As a nation, we have the attention span of a gnat, and these are generation-long challenges here. We need to build seawalls and surge channels and conduct vast infrastructure planning than can ameliorate the impact of such superstorms. More likely, we will just try to forget about it, leaving Americans again with the ruins of their hopes and dreams. We can be very shallow that way.

"There’s a reason the Constitution begins “We the people . . .” rather than “We the unconnected individuals who couldn’t care less about one another . . . .” - Eugene Robinson