When our local Illinois Red Cross volunteer asked me last week, "Is FEMA still paying your bills?" I knew how bad the Katrina preconceptions had gotten.

In the middle of the night, I woke up and thought of changing the definition to 8/29 for another chance to open the dialogue as an evacuee. The RE-Define 8/29 campaign attempts to open a new dialogue about the flood's after-effects, without the negative associations that have started to...