Let's Hope For A Better Day Tommorrow
I'm going to bed. Let's hope that tommorrow, Friday, will be a much better day for the people in New Orleans. Several thousand or more National Guardsmen taking control of the city, the Superdome evacuated, help to the Convention Center, things getting a lot better. Let's hope.
It's sinking home for me how much help the Gulf Coast refugees are going to need, and for how long. The hundreds of thousands of people who are going into refugee camps like the Astrodome are going to be there for months and months. Lots of them have nothing to go back to - no home, no job, no functioning city. Texas is even making plans to enroll the refugee kids in school. And of the hundreds of thousands of people who escaped New Orleans before the storm, many are in deep trouble too, running out of money for hotels and gas, will soon be needing refugee shelters.
Damn, when something like this happens, you really see how vulnerable it is to be poor. If my family and I lived in New Orleans, we'd have evacuated in our air-conditioned cars to somewhere comfortably far away, we'd be unpacking in an Embassy Suites, maybe negotiating a weekly rate, maybe thinking about renting a local apartment month-to-month, the kids would think it was an adventure, there'd be no issue about whether we'd have a place to sleep tommorrow or next month or even next year. But there's - I'll make a guess - a half-million Americans who've lost everything they had. This is so bad. I donated already but I'm going to talk to my wife about doing it again.
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