I'm on the Gulf Coast cleaning up after Katrina. My grandparents didn't get hit as bad by Katrina as they did by Ivan. Ivan was just as bad as Katrina, of course, but the levee break made it so much worse for New Orleans. Ivan was the one that made them evaluate the levees and conclude "they won't hold". Wanna read something creepy? Check out the October 2004 issue of National Geographic, their article about how New Orleans is going to be underwater the next time a big hurricane hits.

Still, all the attention on New Orleans is little consolation for the folks down here, who have had everything destroyed again after it just got destroyed last year. I'm cutting down branches that have barely healed from when I cut them off higher last year. This town is pretty much wiped off the map. Last time it was debris everywhere, now its the remains of reconstruction projects scattered everywhere. My cousin Frank says that the aftermath of the hurricane, the chaos and lawlessness, was the strangest experience of his life. A tree went through the house next to his and its gone now. For a while there gasoline was really hard to get. A lot of the roads are open again but I'm still having trouble getting to New Orleans. The City of New Orleans is running but not the Sunset Limited from Mobile.

Tragedies can be measured by the number of people they affect, but for any given victim the disaster is the same. It's so frustrating that our culture is one of rushing to aid anybody who is held up by the media as a poor poor victim, but when it comes to legislation to help some unseen sufferer (things like welfare, health care, rehab) we don't want to lift a finger or raise those taxes a cent.