A rebuttal to the first essay.

There will be, as the mud is scraped away, a growing number of stories of individuals and families who got out of the flood alive because they were resourceful. Women who float their children to safety after being repulsed by conditions at the Superdome or the Convention Center. Strong-willed people who couldn't get out before but managed to wade and walk to the last standing bridge and cross the river or to build a raft and paddle slowly out of the miasma.

This resourcefulness is something that too many Americans never learned in the last couple of generations. We now have 911 and fire trucks and ambulances. We have Civil Defense and first aiders and Mountain Rescue (I did that for several years). We assume someone else will come help us when we call. If a tornado scours away a town the survivors quickly move along and find new housing and hopefully their same jobs. The human ant hill quickly moves in to hand out the survivors and to spread the loss among the larger community.

Disasters of the size of the tsunami last December received a lot of world attention, but the populations around the impacted area absorbed much of loss and people relocated. I have read that villages in many places aren't being allowed back in the ravaged areas--but I'll have to go look for updates to see if this is truly still the case, so don't quote me.

New Orleans and the Gulf Coast had several days warning. Katrina was at first considered a low-threat category one hurricane as it approached Florida--I remember hearing the description of it as a big sloppy wet storm but not particularly dangerous. But when it crossed over into the warm water of the Gulf people began making noises about how large and strong it was becoming. New Orleans and the Gulf Coast were given the entire weekend to evacuate. The tsunami victims had no such warning.

I heard an email message read out on the Diane Rehm show earlier in the week. It had come from someone listening in that area hit by the tsunami, and the writer registered his offense at hearing the hurricane compared to the tsunami, because the circumstances were so different. How CAN Americans make such a claim, when they had a warning but didn't have the common sense to get out of harm's way?

But think about it--this glass is more than half full. 80% of the population got itself safely out of New Orleans, most under their own power, and is safe somewhere else. They are also homeless and needing the same support as those still in the cesspool that New Orleans has become. The local LA/MS/AL response has been tireless and has worked to the limits of their ability and beyond. To criticize them for an inadequate response is to offer a huge slap in the faces of those working to save lives. But all of a sudden Americans can see for themselves here at home what the rest of the world has know all along--the process of moving people who are suddenly refugees to safe places is difficult. The Corps of Engineers is working to stop the holes in the levees and to fix the pumps. The difficult task of clearing paths through and retrieving and burying bodies will then begin. Corpses, when found. won't be recognizable or identifiable. It will look and feel like a disaster in a Third World country.

I actually would like to set politics aside and let this rescue work move ahead without all of the finger pointing slowing it down. It is too late for George Bush to experience any political comeuppance from this event, since he can't run for office again anyway. He has wasted his political capital fighting an immoral war in Iraq and now the money and human capital that could so easily have been called upon to help in New Orleans is overseas being strafed by snipers and suicide bombers. Halliburton is a company big enough to handle many of the logistics for moving and feeding large numbers of people--but they're already tied up doing that in Iraq. They were looking for work and Bush supplied it a few years ago. Now lets move on, we're stuck with that.

The big test, the battle of wills, will come when New Orleans is pumped dry. Scrape up the billions of pounds of rubbish, bury the dead humans and animals, de-toxify the soup of chemicals (deja vu here--we've discussed this recently somewhere else) and then convince people they can't move back without huge changes. Houses on tall foundations, reinforced infrastructure, and above all, restored wetlands to absorb much of the water that hit New Orleans so hard. It will take resourceful people to figure out if any of that area can be restored to be more than a port and a refinery town. I won't write off the enterprise completely--this could be a marvelous example of how to do it right this time. But only build there with the knowledge that this isn't the last storm of this size that will hit that place, and if you're going to live there, you need to be prepared to bug out at a moment's notice, and you can't build there if you don't follow some strict rules that make the dwellings safer from wind and water. You think there was a big sucking sound when Bush's billions hit Halliburton in Iraq? Americans can be just as corrupt as corporations and citizens of other nations when faced with tons of money with fewer strings than usual. Lets hope the resourceful folks are the ones who get their hands on it and make some good decisions.

In the meantime, I want to see those stories start emerging of the resourceful survivors. We need to hear people in other regions of the U.S. start saying "if something like that happened here, what do I have set aside for an emergency?" and then go buy a bunch of bottled water and canned food and first aid kits to keep in their houses for disaster preparations. Let's look for people to stop pointing fingers and shouting contemptible accusations, and let's instead learn from this and as we in large cities in surrounding states absorb the equivalent of entire small cities into our midsts. There's no Pollyanna speaking here. Things are going to be grim and nasty for a long time to come, and we in surrounding areas are going to be feeding and schooling and housing and nursing back to health a lot of injured people. If people want to help, then be ready to find housing and employment for those who are displaced from New Orleans. Chances are they're going to stay where they land, because the rebuilding will be a long time in the making. Are those who are pointing fingers and shouting "racist" and "genocide" going to make room in their neighborhoods for some of these families to take up permanent residence?

We shall see.