I usually don't like writing about current events because I don't feel I know enough about them to pass any meaningful judgment. But I think what's going on in New Orleans has nothing to do with politics and government. It's an issue of humans doing what they can to survive.

We have been a spoiled country for a very long time. It used to be that we would watch these uncivilized beasts kill each other in the streets, loot, riot, warble incoherent sentences in foreign languages as we sat in front of our newly purchased plasma TV's. But now things are changing. Now we are the looting country, the destitute people, the naked, screaming babies, the corpses lef to rot in the middle of a road. And it's damn unsettling.

Within the wake of each horrid natural disaster, every suicide attempt, it has occured to me that it's coming closer and closer to home. No one cared about the tsunami. I mean they did. But admit it. You were all watching CNN and thanking whatever god you believe in that at least it wasn't you. Because that's what happens. But now it is us, and we don't know in the hell to do with ourselves when it's our citizens who are starving, who are killing and raping each other, when it's our children with no food, our diabetics with no insulin, our law that means absolutely nothing to the deaf ears of people who are just doing whatever they can to stay alive. Because maybe they want to live to see their kids grow, or to get married, or to even have kids. Maybe they don't want to die next to an abandoned electronics shop and not have anyone care and to be the subject of another update by an unfeeling media who is secretly happy that at last there's something to talk about. Maybe these people just want the president to look at them and say, "I want you to live. I'm doing all I can for you." In criminal justice today we talked about whether or not it's ok to loot, and some kids thought it was ok to steal food but not other things like jewelry. I think in a situation like that it's ok to steal anything. It's ok to steal food so you can eat, clothes that you can wear, jewelry so you can sell it and at least have some money after your home has been demolished. What is so hard to grasp is that the basic laws that govern us all in our everyday lives don't exist there any longer. These people have been thrown into a total chaotic state, and it's horribly unfair for us to sit there and watch them squirm and suffer and say, "look how unruly they are." Because you know damn well if you were in a building with 25,000 other people, you'd throw your iPod and your palm pilot and your laptop over a bridge just so you can get enough to eat to live through the week. Every single person has the ability to kill, to steal, to defy law, to look an officer in the face and tell him to fuck himself.

I sat here online and read another article about Katrina and ate a fattening chicken wrap. I felt bad for doing so. I wish I could help.