water, add wind

...what could have prepared us for this? i mean, other than the fact that we were warned weeks out, and saw all of those red and yellow whirls on the weather maps for days and days before....we knew it was coming, and some could leave, and others couldn't, and they took children from parents and best friends from their pets...and what would you do differently if you knew then what you know now....that there would be no water or food for days or, for some who are still being rescued, weeks later...what would you do differently as a person sitting in Austin, Texas, knowing what was to come....we would have run as hard as we could run to grab up everyone out of the way...every old person in a nursing home... every poor child and his mother, father, grandmother, cat, dog and blankie...every person who ever laughed in nawlins would have got there and stayed up all night dancing and playing the blues until the ghosts of hundreds of years on the Mississippi delta could have kicked up enough river rocks to bolster the levees turn back the wind....how could there still be people in tiny Mississippi towns who are just now getting help, three weeks later?

How
could
there
still
be
thousands
of
Americans
needing
help?

Because there are millions and millions of people who are in poverty in this country, that's how. And millions more have fallen into poverty during the last five years. Poverty is a growth industry here. And yet, our elected leaders, this year--in spite of the incredible revelation of how a government can forget its own people for a week because they are poor, 'less than,' invisible--under the vacuous non-leadership of George Bush, the Republican Senators and Congresspersons will make permanent a tax cut for the wealthiest 1% of the people. How many ways can we get it wrong? We're batting a perfect thousand.