For the past week I've been trying and failing miserably to write a poem about the unnecessary tragedy in New Orleans, and it's just been too much. The Bush administration deserves a great deal of blame for its slow and shamefully incompetent response, but there's been at least 40 years, ever since hurricane Betsy, of incompetence and footdragging and greed and stupidity in every administration and every Congress to set the stage on which this bunch has so spectacularly failed—and failed at what they claim is their first priority. Had it been truck bombs and not a storm that breached the levees, the only difference would have been that the poor would not have died alone.
It's just overwhelming. I know last year's tsunami killed more people—but those deaths weren't predictable and preventable, and didn't bring out the cranks and wankers on both the left and the right, the first obsessed with lunatic conspiracies and the second with their nasty god's supposed vengeance on a wicked city. Such folks almost deserve their worst fears.
Give to the Red Cross. There's lots of easy opportunities on the web—iTunes and Amazon and Google, among lots of others, make it very easy.
9:29:19 PM 
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