Well, this hurricane business is just filling me up with despair. I'm terribly afraid that now that help has started arriving, the story will be one of race, not poverty . . . and it's a tired story, with no new plotlines. I can almost palpably feel the sympathy of middle America ebb as accounts of rapes and murders in the Superdome fill the airwaves. I'm embarrassed for black America as young teens say on national tv, as I heard one young man say early into the tragedy, "We need help! We're forced to rob each other just to stay alive!" I keep thinking of the Joads . . . or Riddley Walker, or [name your favorite sci-fi "after-the-bomb" dystopia here].

And then there's the outrage that the plans for evacuating New Orleans never included evacuating the 100,000+ households that authorities knew didn't have private transportation; the plan always involved people leaving by car. How could they allow such a thing? How could they take away wetlands and build in ways that they knew would compromise the safety of the city? Again, the answer is all too easy: The people who are/were housed in the Superdome didn't matter. They never mattered; long before the levees broke, they had been discounted, rendered invisible. What mattered was, how much money someone could make. I think Paul was right: Love of money is the root of all evil. How else could people who've lost everything be persuaded that taking clothes and electronic toys and beauty supplies from Wal-mart could ever make them feel whole?

But mostly it's the oldness of the story, the tiredness of the story, and its endless repetition that get me down. What is a person to do in the face of timeless greed? No explanation you put on this tragedy and its aftermath is sufficient; no action seems efficacious enough, or, even, efficacious at all. I'm plunking my $5 into the Red Cross coffers every time I go buy food at Whole Paychecks (the Red Cross itself is virtually unreachable; phone lines jammed and website perpetually busy), and I wish wish wish I could be down in the thick of it all, offering aid all day long and falling asleep exhausted, knowing at least that I'd done what I could. But even if I'd done that, I'm not sure that anything would be accomplished . . . It was New Orleans this time, but the same thing would happen in any American city, and, I'm convinced, the same thing could happen in Canada with first nations people, or in Australia with aboriginals, or anywhere else with their downtrodden. I simply cannot wrap my head around enough of this puzzle to know what would have to change for events like this not to happen.

Ah, well. Back to holding up my little corner of the sky . . . and dropping those fivers in the can at Whole Foods . . .