When you start to thinking there's really no hope for New Orleans -- ruined by the Federal Flood, ruined before that by its own dysfunction, ruined forever by grafters and bad schools and bad will between black and white -- you stumble upon a little ray of sunshine cutting through the thick canopy of detritus.
Improbably, you almost ignore the light because you are so in wonder that a layer of dead vegetation, dead people, dead hopes and dead dreams can stay suspended above you -- a defunct version of a once vibrant, verdant ecosystem. But there it is.
A confounding light. A ray of hope. A beacon of excellence amid a world of failure.
IF YOU WANT TO SEE some first-rate guerrilla media from a bunch of kids who refuse to give up on their city, go here. If a once-great city is to be reborn and reformed, it's not going to be at the hands of its politicians . . . or those relics from Washington.
If New Orleans -- if Louisiana -- one day rises out of the muck of fatalism and apathy, it'll be because some young people were too clueless to know it was all a hopeless case, and that they oughtn't have wasted their time trying.