Aug. 29, 2005 is a day America will always remember; that same day was one when Louisiana was forgotten.    On that day, Americans discovered the underbelly of the American dream. By the time Hurricane Katrina galloped through the Gulf Coast, thousands died, hundreds of thousands more rendered homeless and billions of dollars in property lost. The richest land on Earth suddenly resembled the Third World — desolate, like the ruins of a biblical plague.    We all remember the images: frightened people huddling together in a leaking Louisiana Superdome; stranded men waving white shirts from rooftops, beckoning helicopters to rescue them from the deluge; carcasses, decomposed, bloated, in puddles, surrounded by floating household debris. To get a better insight about the tragedy, I decided to watch two documentaries that provide very different perspectives on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina: “Katrina’s Children” and “When the Levees Broke.” “Katrina’s Children” is directed by Laura Belsey, and it focuses on the plight and memories of about 15 children, ranging from six to 10 years old, who were veterans of the storm. Eschewing most of the recognizable footage of the event, Belsey has the children simply tell their stories or sketch them with crayons or watercolor paints. The film mirrors New Orleans’s diversity by having black, white, Vietnamese and Indian children among its subjects.This is a heartrending film. A tale of loss: a loss of innocence, of friends, of memories, of toys, of pets.We deserve blame for letting these young ones pass through those horrors, but our greater shame lies in not realizing they have been branded for life and they are still hurting. “Sometimes I get nightmares,” one of children said. It appears we are too engrossed in ourselves to see others who need to be comforted.Belsey admirably reveals the trauma of Katrina’s children, and for her effort she merits our thanks.”When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts” is a 2006 HBO documentary directed by Spike Lee.Although widely known as an agent provocateur, especially with race-related causes, Lee wisely tones down the vitriol and lets his camera loose, so the victims can recount their stories. “When the Levees Broke” might seem like a herculean slog, but it is worth the time and effort spent on it.The film aspires to be the definitive account of the events that transpired during and after the hurricane swept the South, which for the most part is a success; it fails, however, when it aims to get to the root causes of the disaster. The film begins with the Congressional hearings, then immediately proceeds to the nonexistent evacuation from New Orleans. It looks at the response of adjacent parishes to the fleeing New Orleans residents, why the federal government didn’t respond more quickly, how President Bush fiddled, or at least strummed, while his countrymen drowned.We get in detail how FEMA — an agency incapable of zipping a fly correctly — botched rescue operations for the city and ended up separating families as people got shipped to locations across the United States.”When the Levees Broke” is an eye-opener, a shocking tribute to a pantheon of incompetents, an ode to a bungling administration.Unfortunately, Lee’s penchant for playing the blame game detracts from the potency of his narrative; likewise, his tendency of relying on racism evades the germane discussions which should be taking place.The first is a need for Americans to disabuse themselves from the notion that they are exempt from natural disasters. In a brief scene where Rev. Al Sharpton cautioned the media from calling the evacuees “refugees,” I was left befuddled by the callousness of his request. Are the hundred thousands who died in the Banda Aceh tsunami more evil than Americans? Does Sharpton really know what a refugee is?The sooner we cure ourselves of the hubristic belief that “it” cannot happen to us and realize that man serves at the pleasure of the heavens, the more effective we will be in tackling subsequent events of this nature.We also have to ask what kind of government we want. The underlying structure of governmental ineptitude, corporate aggrandizement at the people’s expense, and the emasculation of the citizenry, will continue to exist regardless of the political party in power. It must be convenient to blame the Republican party for the debacle in order to make charges of racism stick — “Bush does not care about black people” — but we must remember Democrats ran the show both at New Orleans and in Baton Rouge. So how would we want our government to be benevolent? How should government determine its priorities for the national good? Finally, what do we make of New Orleans?Three years ago, a professor at Northwestern University asked me: “Does it make sense to rebuild New Orleans as it was? For sure, the port is needed but even that part can probably be somewhat relocated and the marshlands allowed to regenerate for protection. A place that has to place its dead above-ground in the best of times is surely questionable.”I don’t have any answers, but rather than searching for racist phantoms, I believe these are the issues worth addressing.—-contact Freke Ette at [email protected]