The tragedy in Louisiana and Mississippi has me thinking about a dozen things at the same time. First, I'm reminded of the 9/11 tragedy and how I have similar stunned and dazed feeling. This makes me feel slightly guilty, because the tsunami that hit at the beginning of the year was the bigger disaster by a few orders of magnitude, but I did not feel that same connection.

One thing that has really disturbs me is the political nastiness that been going on. The blame game. Clearly, those levees in New Orleans should have been bigger, but it would have taken decades to build them, so the bad decisions were made in the 80s and 90s. Blaming George Bush for the levees is a bit ridiculous. Also, I'm not sure that much more could have been done to evacuate the city. An order went out when it became clear that the hurricane was going to hit, and those who couldn't leave were offered shelter in the Superdome. The evacuation went smoothly, with traffic delays, but no excessive amounts of car accidents.

The most amazing thing to me is that despite all the hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of homes that were destroyed, less than 500 people died. 500 is a lot, don't get me wrong. But compared to the number of homes that were wiped out, it's pretty small. The vast majority of those homes were empty. That really should be the headline here: "Despite economic devastation on a scale never seen before in the United States, millions safely evacuated." I think another headline ought to be "Rescue workers lose homes, but work to help others in need." Those headlines are what it is about here. We ought to be applauding those who did their best under emergency circumstances. Months from now we can look back and in review figure out what to do better the next time.