If you didn't catch the Sunday paper on your way to the Black Men of Labor Second Line, you missed out big time.

Tom Piazza, writer of Why New Orleans Matters, City of Refuge, and currently working on the upcoming HBO series, Treme, wrote this absolutely scathing Sunday editorial for the Times-Picayune.

My house was finally broken into, after 15 years of waiting for it to happen. It used to happen to other people. Now it has happened to me. Luckily, I own more or less nothing of any value to a thief, except for a handful of small items, which they took. They also managed to ransack the place pretty well. "Trashed" would be the word. The break-in happened the day before the Katrina anniversary. On the same day, I heard that our governor signed an agreement that would allow marshals and bulldozers to come in and seize hundreds of people's homes in lower Mid-City to make room for a hospital complex that could easily be built on a different site.

Yes, I am upset that a thief broke in. But nobody is coming to take a house that I rebuilt with four years of hard labor after the levee failures. The city that I fought to come back to has not decided to summarily wipe away all my hard work and faith. That is happening to other people.

Four years after Katrina, New Orleans is at a crossroads -- not just a logistical crossroads, but a moral one, and one might as well say a spiritual one. We are all rightly concerned about crime -- violent crime, like the kind that took Dinerral Shavers and Helen Hill, and nonviolent crime like the house break-ins that might now fairly be called an epidemic.

But there is a different kind of crime about to happen in our city, and in some ways it is more ominous because it travels under the cloak of the law. With a stroke of a pen, an elected official, serving the interests of a cadre of greedy and selfish developers, has just wiped away the hopes, the work and the dreams not just of a single victim, but of hundreds of hardworking people who trusted and loved this city and worked to rebuild it.

Would I like to get my hands on the thief who broke into my house? Yes. But he (she?) probably lives a wretched existence, sneaking around and stealing. Probably not being very highly rewarded for it either.

The people who will profit from the rape of Mid-City are already well-off. They sit on the boards of LSU and Tulane; they stroll the halls of the state Capitol, City Hall and the Governor's Mansion. They won't hear the sound of the house they rebuilt being crushed by bulldozers. It will happen to other people.

Charity Hospital sits empty. Much of downtown, for that matter, sits empty. Instead of spreading out into Mid-City, the badly needed medical facilities could be built much more quickly, much less expensively, and much more humanely, by updating and using Charity and the surrounding medical district. It would give downtown a badly needed revitalizing mechanism, and it would save people's homes, and it would get medical care to the city more quickly.

Why isn't it being done? Because a handful of greedy bastards want a shiny monument to their own power and ego. It's not about getting health care to the people of New Orleans. It's about money and power. If you live somewhere else in the city, as I do, you can tell yourself that it's happening to other people. But if we learned one thing from Katrina, it is that we are part of an integrated social and geographical and spiritual ecosystem. We can turn our heads as long as it is going on somewhere else and happening to someone else. Or we can get mad now, and make a stand for human dignity and fairness against greed and power lust.

In his song about the bank robber Pretty Boy Floyd, written 70 years ago, the singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie sang,

"As through this world I've wandered, I've met lots of funny men.

Some will rob you with a six gun, and some with a fountain pen."

He could turn a phrase, that Woody Guthrie. He ended the song thusly:

"But as through this world you travel, and as through this world you roam,

You will never see an outlaw drive a family from their home."

A crime doesn't stop being a crime just because the law is on its side. And Judas Iscariot was paid handsomely by the law for his services. There's still time, but not much, to rescue the soul of this city before the bulldozers crank up.

Maybe the saddest part of this whole ordeal is that after all the organizing citizens did in 2006 to  ensure the rights of their neighborhoods to rebuild, Lower Mid-City might be the first community in New Orleans denied that right because, as Mr. Piazza put it, "a handful of greedy bastards want a shiny monument to their own power and ego."

Of course this isn't the first time Tom Piazza has considered the monument-in-lieu-of-accomplishment theory for New Orleans politicians.