What's the difference between New Orleans and Niger?
They speak better French in Niger.
The post hurricane situation along the Gulf Coast has a surreal quality to it. This cannot be part of the United States of America, and yet it is.
Who are these people we are seeing at the Super Dome and Convention Center in New Orleans?
They are the poor, the uneducated, the Americans living below the poverty line in the heartless south with its relentless heat and humidity.
Usually we don't see them. We don't want to see them.
The flooding in their city has forced them out of their habitat and now they prowl for food and water to drink. Now we have to see them because they are on every television channel.
For some reason that I don't fully comprehend, very little aid is able to reach them. It is unfathomable considering we have buses, helicopters, and, dare I say it, boats - one of the oldest modes of transportation after feet.
My belief is that if these people are not evacuated by Sunday, you might as well just bring in a backhoe and start gathering up the corpses.
Then again, you probably could make it less painful and more merciful by dropping the sandbags being used to repair the levee directly on the refugees.
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