In a way I’m relieved. Because I don’t know that I could live around people who were way more perfect than the rest of the people in the world. I wouldn’t know what to do if things always ran smoothly. It would all be too easy and kind of boring.

On the other hand, it bugs me when I hear people say that the United States is the best country in the world. And it really makes me mad when they use that as an excuse to go drop bombs on a sovereign country who did not attack us.

Oh heck, our hero, Kurt Vonnegut, said it best a couple of days ago during an interview with Bill Maher:

“I’ve still got a passport, but if I showed this now in Portugal or Spain or Italy or Germany or France, or Denmark, or Japan or even Communist China, what it would say about me is that I am not only from the richest country in the world, but the dumbest country in the world.”

And this:
“Well, this country was already financially and spiritually ruined before the hurricane ever hit New Orleans. I thought about the tsunami hitting Indonesia. Nature was a piker compared to human beings when it comes to killing people. The tsunami killed, I think, I calculated about 3% as many people as the Holocaust killed.”

“Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels of government,” Mr. Bush said. “And to the extent that the federal government didn’t fully do its job right, I take responsibility.

“I want to know what went right and what went wrong,” Mr. Bush added. “I want to know how to better cooperate with state and local government, to be able to answer that very question that you asked: Are we capable of dealing with a severe attack or another severe storm?”

“An initial examination of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath demonstrates the extent to which the federal government failed to fulfill the pledge it made after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to face domestic threats as a unified, seamless force. >snip< (The busses) were an obvious linchpin for evacuating a city where nearly 100,000 people had no cars. Yet the federal, state and local officials who had failed to round up buses in advance were now in a frantic hunt. It would be two more days before they found enough to empty the shelters.”

At this point, the drivers refused to take the busses into the city.

Governor Blanco said the bus drivers, many of them women, “got afraid to drive. So then we looked for somebody of authority to drive the school buses.”

Some of those who tried to walk out were prevented from doing so. At least one evacuation route was blocked. Read “Police in Suburbs Blocked Evacuees, Witnesses Report“

Police agencies south of New Orleans were so fearful of the crowds attempting to leave the city after Hurricane Katrina that they sealed a crucial bridge over the Mississippi River and turned back hundreds of desperate evacuees, according to two paramedics who were in the crowd.

The paramedics and two other witnesses said officers sometimes shot guns over the heads of fleeing people.

“she had changed her mind about the war in Iraq. She said, “It’s no longer worthwhile” as if talking about hanging her laundry >snip< she had exposed >snip< the violence of the American mind: We can kill at whim. We can waltz into other countries with our guns loaded when we feel like it. >snip< war can be as easy a choice as which flavor ice cream you prefer. This week I feel like fighting, maybe next week I won’t. >snip< It is vile to promote the war, vote for it, support it with your flags and stickers, and then, because the violence continues, >snip< or that it might be ruining the economy, >snip< decide it is not “worthwhile”.

The devastation of Katrina pales beside the horror American armed forces are creating in Iraq. To date, there are 1,896 dead American soldiers, a minimum of 30,000 dead Iraqi soldiers, and reported civilian deaths of at least 24,000 at an estimated cost of over $193 billion US dollars.

That a corpse lies on Union Street may not shock; in the wake of last week’s hurricane, there are surely hundreds, probably thousands. What is remarkable is that on a downtown street in a major American city, a corpse can decompose for days, like carrion, and that is acceptable.

Welcome to New Orleans in the post-apocalypse, half baked and half deluged: pestilent, eerie, unnaturally quiet.

Scraggly residents emerge from waterlogged wood to say strange things, and then return into the rot. Cars drive the wrong way on the Interstate and no one cares. Fires burn, dogs scavenge, and old signs from les bons temps have been replaced with hand-scrawled threats that looters will be shot dead.

The incomprehensible has become so routine here that it tends to lull you into acceptance. On Sunday, for example, several soldiers on Jefferson Highway had guns aimed at the heads of several prostrate men suspected of breaking into an electronics store.

A car pulled right up to this tense scene and the driver leaned out his window to ask a soldier a question: “Hey, how do you get to the interstate?”

>snip< Here, then, the New Orleans of today, where open fire hydrants gush the last thing needed on these streets; where one of the many gag-inducing smells – that of rancid meat – is better than MapQuest in pinpointing the presence of a market; and where images of irony beg to be noticed. >snip< On Clouet Street, where a days-old fire continues to burn where a warehouse once stood, a man on a bicycle wheels up through the smoke to introduce himself as Strangebone. The nights without power or water have been tough, especially since the police took away the gun he was carrying – “They beat me and threatened to kill me,” he says – but there are benefits to this new world. “You’re able to see the stars,” he says. “It’s wonderful.” >snip<

Meanwhile, back downtown, the shadows of another evening crept like spilled black water over someone’s corpse.

What I like about the story is the fact that this hurricane has been a great leveler. Not in the sense that the rich were left behind to grovel with the poor, as that certainly is not the case, but that when push comes to shove, all countries deal with disaster in the same way. When something comes along to shake the foundations of a social structure, no matter where you live, there will be looting, starvation, disease, anarchy, and death.

Another article from yahoo, deals with a Belizean family who don’t want to leave their home in New Orleans. After weathering the worst of it, they just as soon stay put.

“Americans have too much easy life, so when hardship come around, they can’t take it,” she told Reuters with a smile as she sat beside a canoe full of plantains and other produce.

These and other stories remind me of something I read in the Bible about the Meek Inheriting the Earth. The social structure in New Orleans has turned upside down. The people at the bottom of the pyramid are better equipped to cope with life in a disaster area.

I like the poetic justice of it all. Here we are, the richest country in the world, happily bombing Iraq into smithereens and here comes this hurricane and devastates a beloved city. And then, before you know it, there are corpses lying in the streets for days. Yet some of the people left behind are able to see peace and beauty in the silence and in the dark.