The Looting of New Orleans: HO HO HO and a Bottle of Dumb

I'm watching the Looting of New Orleans lately. First Mother Nature barreled in uninvited, looting the city of her infrastructure. Now the survivors of Hurricane Katrina are relieving stores, shops, homes of any remaining valuables. It is making me laugh. It is making me cry. It is making me pray. In the first category is the Young Hoodlum crowd running away with TVs, appliances, sneakers and plastic stuff from Walmart. Are we going to find a nice usable outlet to plug your new entertainment systems into, hmmm? Or are you going to sell the items to refugees with no food and no money? Perhaps set up shop on Ebay as soon as someone restores internet service to your soon-to-be condemned house? Or are you just going to try to take it all the the Houston Astrodome with you when you get evacuated? hahahaha. All these normally "stealable" items are now worthless crap! Except those of you who got away with diamond jewelry. Well good luck setting up the new life, anyway! The other categories are the people I see in the food stores. For some reason a lot of the news anchors are also referring to THESE people as looters. Give me a break! Can't you new experts distinguish between lawlessness and survival? I'm watching men grabbing loaves of bread and bottled water. Women making off with formula and baby diapers. Do you think these people are taking the Huggies to sell on the black market? For Katrina's sake, let's understand that there is NO RUNNING WATER AND NO FRESH FOOD COMING. Do you honestly believe the store owners are going to show up next month and try to sell the bread and canned goods remaining on the shelves. I'm sorry, but that's not looting if you are only taking what you need to survive. I have suggested that this event is going to be bigger in impact than the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It looks like it has already reached that dimension. The whole country is going to feel the impact of this. They are talking about a million plus refugees. How many citizens does the U.S. have? Isn't that 1 out of every 320 people in the country? Initial reports suggested Katrina would NOT be as expensive, damage-wise, as Hurricane Andrew. Hahahahaha. I knew right away that estimate was off. Hurricane Andrew's damage was limited to a small area of South Florida, and was mostly wind damage. Water damage is extremely insidious and costly to clean up. And New Orleans is just a huge metropolitan area by comparison. Add to that the tremendous devastation in Alabama and Mississippi. At this point I'd say $100 billion in damage is conservative. And that's not even counting the economic loss of all the businesses not operating for months. (Andrew was about a $25 billion event.) Personally I would've evacuated in the face of an oncoming Category Five hurricane. But one of the main reasons for that is that we had three hurricanes fly over the house last year, all of which were Category I or less by the time they passed over. It was still scary sitting there wondering if it could get any louder, and hoping the roof wouldn't blow off. I've watched and read stories of people who barely survived Hurricane Andrew in 1992, and Ivan last year. The stories are sobering. If more people knew of those stories, fewer might have stayed behind to try to "ride out" Katrina. It is weird watching the reporting from the Superdome. It felt like ABC's top football analyst Al Michaels ought to be giving us the play-by-play. Especially now that all those refugees are going to be bused to the Houston Astrodome. (Macabre aside: what happens if a hurricane takes aim at Houston? On to Seattle's King Dome!) Now it's time to send money to the Red Cross. To give blood. To pray. And to pack up our most valuable memories and put them in a safe place in case we are ever called upon to evacuate due to a natural disaster. They are still talking of rebuilding New Orleans. I don't know if they say that because they don't know what else to say, or if they really believe it is possible. Is there any other place in the U.S. where we are looking for real estate 6-12 feet below water where we can build a city for 1.3 million people? Even so, New Orleans probably STILL wouldn't be the best place to build it. I know it is a city full of charm and history. It is also now drenched in debris and a toxic witch's brew of water. Perhaps it is best preserved as a fable, like Atlantis, as a memory, like the World Trade Center, or as a piece of history, like Pompeii. New Orleans can never be the same. Why pretend otherwise?