Pretty much all of the authority figures on the ground in the area have said that most of the people who were left behind didn't have access to transportation out of the area. Many of the people who were left behind who have been interviewed have said they didn't have access to any transportation out of the area. If that's not enough proof for you, your problems are bigger than you realize, and they have nothing to do with me.

Nope, not good enough. Send some links or citations. I won't accept your telling of the thing to defend your position. Send someone else's story, with a link to a legitimate media outlet, not a blog somewhere. It's time you stopped analyzing people who argue with you as if they must be nuts because they don't agree with you. I've tried on several occasions to discuss things where you got your wind up, but your nasty rebuttals to all and sundry show no care for the fact that we agree on many things. You convince me again that you're more interested in the argument than in the relationships that exist here at Mudcat. I'm sorry for that.

Meanwhile, you're so terribly willing to blame everyone EXCEPT the people who didn't get themselves out of harms way. The biggest part of the responsibility lay with the individuals themselves to go when they were told to do so. The adults have free-agency and had to act on behalf of themselves and their children. Many of them made bad decisions, to try to protect property instead of life and limb. Those who did evacuate and go to the places set aside for use were doing what they were told and really were, along with those too ill to be moved and thus not moved at all, the first order victims in this horror, in the lack of care they received in the place they were stuck in.

But before you launch into another jeremiad, stop and think. No one is ever going to be able to truly parse out the real versus the imagined and the attributed reasons people didn't leave their homes in the path of the storm. A lot of people simply made a bad decision to stay. A lot of people for whatever reason weren't paying attention and didn't or couldn't get out when they realized how bad it was. And a lot of people are probably kicking themselves from here to next Tuesday for deciding to stay. But I doubt they're admitting it on national television and for the print media. It's too easy to suggest that they couldn't get out rather than that they didn't bother or waited too long until escape was no longer manageable through the usual channels.

There are many many true victims here. That isn't in dispute. But many who were caught up in this were the agents of their own misfortune.

I'm not going to try to identify who had what thought. I am pointing out that there were a lot of bad reasons for staying. There are still people who refuse to leave. On the radio this morning they followed some guys in a flat-bottomed boat who were in that Ninth Ward trying to rescue the last few. There were three guys on a balcony with no articulated good reason for staying, but refusing to leave. I think the boatmen were pretty canny in surmising that those three had something to hide or were sticking around to loot.

FEMA is a disgrace. But that's part two of the story. Once people found themselves in such a horrible situation, they all needed to be rescued. The reasons become moot. And George Bush's new and improved FEMA, politically-charged and top heavy as it is, is a big part of the problem, but to loop back around to the original essay, the problem wasn't genocidal. Letting Bush rework FEMA in with all of his Homeland Security nonsense was suicidal homicidal.

SRS