Hurricane Katrina: Man's Inhumanity to Man

Like many Americans, my knowledge of Hurricane Katrina was based on bits of information that I saw on the news. Somehow, I don't think it hit home as much as it should have - of course I felt bad that this happened and surprised that the response was so slow, surprised that people were in terrible conditions at the Superdome etc. I didn't really understand the anger at the government - it was an natural occurence, right? After watching "When the Levees Broke" the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina entered into my consciousness like it should have. Suddenly I saw faces where before that there had been statistics, I saw stories where before that I saw talking heads on television and politicians blaming each other. One moment I remember in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was this show they made of celebrities asking people to donate to (I believe) the Red Cross while telephone operators were taking people's calls. I remember that Ray Romano was standing trying to read the teleprompter, and he was having such a hard time of it that he began to laugh. He tried to stifle it of course, but the result was sort of a giggly plea for help. There's something about that moment that will probably stay with me forever. The terrible awkwardness of it. It made me wonder - how many of those other people standing there with straight faces really cared what happened to the victims? How many of us? Can we truly feel anymore with the amount of media that we see everyday? There's something terrible happening in the world every single day, and we see it on the news followed by a commercial telling you that "your fine lines and wrinkles" will significantly diminish if you just use this cream. You might see a report about the plight of the people in Darfur followed by a report about the all-important baby Suri, produckt of "TomKat"...We've all been guilty of this on some scale - even those who helped in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina probably did not feel the same sadness every time they see another headline along the lines of "car bomb in middle east". In any case, the problem here was not the actual hurricane - people in the South are aware of the dangers of where they live, the problem here is still "man's inhumanity to man". Especially "poor man". That's something I saw much more clearly with the individual stories on "When the Levees Broke". We're still a long way from equality - and now the whole world knows it.