Last night, Thursday night, I was driving down Highway 290 headed east, when I found myself in the midst of a line of heavy trucks. Stacked on the back were Humvees and other obviously military vehicles.
It was disorientating.
It's hard to understand how, only three hundred odd miles away from here, the world, the civilized world that we take for granted, ends. The roads stop. Everything we are used to, electricity, water, even law and order, are gone.
Buses are bringing people into the city and there is now a constant stream of communications asking for help. Food, clothes, diapers, money. Shelter.
There's so much suffering already, and so much more stored up in the attics of houses as yet unopened in New Orleans. How could this happen? The natural forces that leveled towns and drowned a city are in many ways more understandable than the aftermath. Why, days and days after the most obvious, ponderous force crushed the Gulf coast, are there still people trapped on roofs and huddled on bridges?
Hurricanes aren't like earthquakes or even, God forbid, terrorist attacks. They track with vicious but predictable malice towards a known landfall. Yet the people who are being pulled from the horrid aftermath are, in many cases, being saved by sports fishermen who decided to bring their boats and lend a hand. Even rescued, people languish for days on exposed stretches of highway with no shelter and only occasional water supplies.
I can't understand how people are dying by the roadside for lack of care in the richest, most powerful nation on earth.
Disasters are inevitable. Neither man-made nor the hand of a vengeful God, storms simply form and remind us that however considerable our ability to build, nature can extinguish our pride with greater ease. What cannot be explained is the stunned inability of government, at many levels, to respond.
Where was the food? Where was the water? Why were so many people left to face the most abject misery on their own?
The tragedy is not that the hurricane came. It is that no one else came.
Refugees are streaming now into Houston. There are people all over, and thank God, there are even more people trying to help.
Where the government failed the people are already succeeding.
For myself, in love as I am with your nation and the things for which it stands, I cannot think of a more American statement.