My thoughts exactly.

Left Behind I read this entry this morning and felt strangely comforted that someone else shared my outrage and expressed it so clearly. What the hell is happening to this country? Can someone please tell me? For four years now we've been listening to the endless boogeyman stories about "terruhrists" and of course, "911!!! 911!!!" And we've sat here while Congress distracted us with shit like the Patriot Act and tried to convince us that snooping into our library books is for our own good.

Here's the thing - even I, cynic that I am, thought that all this yammering about Homeland Security meant something - that while the Patriot Act stuff was a load of crap, that behind the nonsense these people were at least toughening up our emergency preparedness and ability to respond when a large number of our citizens were in peril.

I've lived in California and Florida, and I've always said that I'll take hurricanes over earthquakes any day, because you can see a hurricane coming and be prepared. It is also true that hurricane preparedness means having three or four days of food and water on hand, in case you have to wait for assistance.

In this case, we KNEW this storm was going to wallop the Gulf coast. We KNEW this days in advance. This New Orleans scenario had been forecast by experts for YEARS. It is not a shocking and unexpected event. Five days after the rain stops and we have babies dying of dehydration in the filthy streets, because we still haven't gotten any aid to them - yet it can't be because they are inaccessible, because freaking CNN et al. is there filming the insanity. It's because, despite all the hype and chest beating about Homeland Security, our government wasn't ready to mobilize quickly to respond to a long-foretold and foreseen natural disaster. These are the same people who have been scaring the shit out of us for years with their boogeyman nightmares of chemical attacks or nuclear weapons. The boogeyman showed up in the form of a hurricane, and they were caught flat-footed and not at all ready to take charge. And babies are dying in their helpless mothers' arms.

Bush didn't even interrupt his vacation untl the rumblings of "Where is our leader?" hit the NYT editorial page, among other places.

Of course, this is the same crowd that told us the Iraqis would greet us as liberators....

I'm just so sick and disgusted. The urge to just drop everything and head on up there to do something is almost overwhelming. I'm trying to keep in mind that this disaster is going to go on for a long, long time, and the same band of incompetents who can't get water and MREs into town will have no idea what to do with a million homeless people this winter.

Those of us who really aren't in a position to give in to the instinct to just get in the car with a load of bottled water and diapers and jars of peanut butter need to send money now, and then start thinking long term. How will these people be housed, clothed and fed? After the initial horror of this story fades and the camera crews go home, we can't let ourselves slip into complacency and assume the government will take care of them. We need to look for ways to help these people for the next couple of years, at least, because it's quite obvious now that we have no real security in this "Homeland."