Humankind cannot bear very much reality....

South Louisiana supplies one half the heating oil to the country. Louisiana has paid in pollution, land loss from pipeline canals, having our area despoiled for the benefit of the rest of the country. I am not proud that we allowed our land to be despoiled and exploited to this extent, but the rest of the country will see how much Louisiana has given to America at great cost to our people and land. Wait until folks see the price of heating oil go up this winter; then they will know. We are viewed as a poor backward state, and in many ways we are, but dammit, we have given our share, and look what we have gotten in return.

I'm sure when all of this shakes out, there will be blame enough to go around, but the whole world can see how the US takes care of its people in trouble.

I hope that we will realize that the greatest military in the world, star wars missiles, and all the billions spent on defense, just cannot protect us from every catastrophe. Maybe we can put the war on terror in perspective and not operate in constant fear of a terrorist attack to the exclusion of attention to real threats which are ignored.

Again, I cried as I read the six pages that the New Orleans Times-Picayune was able to produce. I go back and forth between great sadness and fury, an wild mix of emotions. My family and I are all OK; we have our houses and life looks pretty normal. but we're not really OK, and we won't be for a very long time.
--janeboatler

I've taken the liberty of reproducing jane's comment here because, of course, this is quite true. It is true for most oil producing regions of this country.

East Texas and West Texas have supplied a great deal of oil to this country. It's supplied jobs, but it hasn't made the regions rich. And it has left them scarred, in ways large and small. The Gulf Coast has reaped the benefits, too: miles and miles of refineries. Ever seen one? It looks like Los Angeles in Blade Runner, without the people. Miles and miles of pipelines, tanks, heating units, cracking units. It's an industrialist's nightmare of hell. And the people who live near them, and work in them, don't enjoy the amenities of life of the people who live in River Oaks and the Memorial Villages in Houston.

This is the underbelly of the "American Dream." New Orleans is the most powerful, the purest example: that much is becoming more clear everyday. The "culture" of New Orleans, as someone said on Democracy Now! this morning, is sold in the French Quarter; it's made elsewhere in the city, in the parts tourists don't want to go, the parts now underwater. A lot of the evacuees, the ones now in Houston (250,000 in all) and elsewhere, will settle where the land. If they can find jobs, make lives, they won't go back to New Orleans. Why should they?

We may have lost that cultural treasure forever. Anne Rice may be wrong; the people may not go back. But what kind of cultural treasure is it, when it is our Third World in our own backyard?

Who's to blame for what has happened here? When I consider how long the Netherlands have lived "below sea level," I can only say: we all are.