Watching all the Katrina coverage leaves me with really mixed emotions. It surely seems that some people just did not evacuate when they were told to, and thus ought to take responsibility for their own predicament and not be so angry when no one comes to rescue them.

It's just beyond me seeing one interviewee reason that because category 1 and 2 storms earlier did no damage to his property the last couple times that a category 4 or 5 storm would not either. I guess its magnitude is just by definition unimaginably different, but they were warned, they were told it would be so much worse, yet they chose to stay, and now they put rescuers in harm's way because of their stupidity. That selfishness pisses me off.

Certainly I feel sorry for people who did evacuate and have lost everything in the disaster. I'm happy to send a contribution to the Red Cross (especially when WB matches it as a benefit of Shelley's employment) as a tiny way to help them out. When a lot of people do that, it helps a great deal.

What I also wonder at, though, is those people who could not evacuate because of age, ill health, or lack of means. Why did the government not help get them out before the storm? Or if there was an attempt made, why was it insufficient? I just have not seen any reasons given as to why people who could not get out on their own were not taken out, assuming they wanted to go.

As a society this kind of disaster is exactly what we deserve, given what we've done to the environmental buffers in the area, the way we've tried to hem in rivers, pretend we've beaten Mother Nature at her own game. It will be more interesting to see what lessons are learned from this situation. Will they simply rebuild the levees higher? Will they ban coastal developments? Will they attempt to re-establish the wetlands?

The looting and rioting surprises me not at all. The apparently late response from the government does somewhat. It's starting to blow up into charges of racism as I write this. The vast majority of images from New Orleans appear to show a lot of black, poor, overweight people in the SuperDome. I don't know the city well enough to know whether that's representative from the journalists' point of view, the city's population, geographic distribution of flooded areas, or any other vantage, but it seems like things may turn much worse if race riots start to emerge.

Probably the next 48 hours will be telling, as the federal relief arrives and so many more thousands of troops come in to establish control.

Wouldn't it be nice if we had a president who spent money studying the effects of human populations and trying to avert disasters instead of creating his own on foreign shores, especially when started under false pretenses?