NEW ORLEANS - On any given weekend, my friend Mark Schleifstein can be found mowing the lawn in front of his ruined and gutted home in the Lakeview section of New Orleans. Even now, a year later, the brown ring around his yellow split-level still shows where the flood waters...

Part of the gospel of post-Katrina New Orleans is that when you go there, you will cry. "Plan to cry," my friend wrote to me. "Everybody cries."

People who know me as a reporter and editor might bet that I'd get out of there dry-eyed. And I almost did.

On...