Here it is, night again, and there they are, the hungry and thirsty thousands outside and inside the Superdome, outside and inside the Convention Center, on the upper floors and roofs of shelters and homes throughout Orleans and St. Bernard.

"This is not the America I grew up in," said one CNN correspondent, who, lucky him, was out at the airport in Kenner seeing the medically needy lined up in another endless holding pattern. And these were the ones who were fortunate, we know, because they now have water and attention. They weren't left on the sidewalk next to decaying bodies, their children screaming for water, their own bodies breaking down from heat, exhaustion, and yes, lack of water. It is horribly cruel that during floods there is no water to drink, but it is not "unpredictable, unknowable" regardless of what the government tells us. They may not have known that -- apparently they know very little -- but anyone who's taken a basic health class knows, and anyone who has given any thought to human needs knows that we cannot survive without the one element that we are made most out of.

"In the help-is-on-the-way category -- how tiresome has that phrase become..." Aaron Brown says, then goes on to give the litany of promises the government continues to list in between their back-patting and inappropriate smiles. The "leaders" insist they never saw this coming, that none of this tragedy was predictable -- certainly not at this scale -- but Aaron Brown knows the truth, and mentions the New Orleans Times-Picayune series, "Washing Away" from three years ago that detailed, predicted, what would happen when a large storm struck, and here it has come to pass just as they said it would.

Another day has passed, another night is rushing through, and very little has changed:


Tomorrow, the governor promises, more national guard troops will arrive, including 800 MPs straight off the plane from Iraq who are "battle-hardened," she assures us, and who have been given "shoot-to-kill" authority in order to gain order. How many would-be-cooks will be shot? How many mothers and fathers desperate for water? If it were the rapists, the violent criminals who were "shot at sight," perhaps many of us would be glad. But now we are asking national guard soldiers to make life and death decisions regarding their own neighbors after we've asked them to kill for us in Iraq already, and once again the good guys and the bad guys all look the same, a recipe for even more PTSD suffering to add to the suffering all around us.

"People are dying there at the convention center. Someone's grandmother...and next to her body is another body. People are literally dying there. They have no food, they have no water...if nothing changes there soon, that body count is going to rise and rise and rise..." CNN's Chris Lawrence tells us. And that is inside and around the convention center, not in the no-man's-land that makes up most of the city. He was reporting from the roof of the French Quarter police station where the officers were holing themselves up for the night, afraid to leave the building. The officers tell him "The men left on the street are the hardest of the hard...these men feel like they can take control of the city..." and then that officers "have deserted the force...in other stations 50-60% may have just walked off the job."

But Bush insists help is on the way, while his minions insist the response has been "immediate" and appropriate. It must be comforting to live so far outside of reality.

CNN's Pentagon correspondent says that the compassionate conservatives in Washington and at the Pentagon think reporters care more about the victims of this tragedy than the members of the government who are trying so hard. The journalist wonders why the government bureaucrats are surprised that people care more about the victims than them, and yes, I wonder that too. "Bodies, Gunfire, and Chaos on New Orleans Streets" reads the Reuters article, further proof to the right-wing that the so-called "liberal media" is "politicizing" this tragedy because they are pointing out the failures of our government.

And what is happening in Houston, at the dream-world Astrodome? It is full, CNN tells us, with only 8,000 (less? more? no one knows) refugees there. They are turning people away. Some of the buses are not air conditioned, and some have been carried off of buses on stretchers. Already someone has died in this new shelter, and thousands upon thousands are still waiting, dreaming, of being able to go to Houston, that oasis turned mirage.

We are witnessing a humanitarian crisis here in the United States of America. Americans dying of thirst and heat on our own streets. Our new Department of Homeland Security has already failed its first test. And though our officials may be worried about their reputations, concerned that they aren't getting enough "credit" for doing so much, our neighbors are suffering and dying, suffering and dying.

Check out this Live Journal live from New Orleans if you're looking for updates about the city directly.

The author says he's staying. May he stay safe!

We are witnessing a humanitarian crisis right here in the United States of America.

New Orleans slips into anarchy, and still thousands do not have water. How many have died of dehydration, of heat stroke, of untreated illness? And how many more will die?

Get these people some water! Get them out of New Orleans! Secure the area! That is the government's job!!! Be a leader, Bush!

Enough talk of prayers, enough talk of "we'll rebuild." Get them some water. Make the place secure. And get everyone out of that city. NOW.

Meanwhile, there are thousands still stranded in St. Bernard Parish. They have no water either. Our government's lack of a proper response is a DISGRACE!

I'm watching MSNBC right now and a gentleman is talking about how his wife is trapped in University Hospital, which has been without electricity since Monday, along with 1300 other patients. They are communicating through text messaging. On the streets around the convention center and superdome, people with infants are crying, literally, for help, and elderly are on the verge of collapse.

With every passing hour, more and more people become the medically needy as they become more dehydrated and suffer heat exhaustion. This crisis is deepening exponentially the longer these people are stranded. It is more difficult to evacuate people who are in the middle of medical emergencies than relatively healthy people. Our inaction and lack of strategy is causing more hardship and more potential for death, and grows worse every moment.

Why haven't we air-dropped supplies? If the national guard can get there, relief can too. It's outrageous. They need water. Immediately. It is blistering hot and they have been without water for days. This is an emergency. Promises are not enough. They need help NOW!

Here we are, four days after Katrina hit, and still there are tens of thousands of people stranded in New Orleans.

The security situation has deteriorated so quickly and so severely that finally the federal government is sending in national guard troops to attempt to gain control. Guess what? New Orleans had a law enforcement crisis before the hurricane. The city had only 1500 police officers for a city of 500,000 plagued by endemic poverty. To give you a sense of how low that is, here in Chicago, a city of 3,000,000, there are nearly 14,000 sworn officers. There were never enough police. And there was always horrible poverty. Why on earth did our government expect there to be calm and peace during a disaster, especially when the survivors are desperate to simply survive amid the overwhelming chaos? That there were guns waiting to be stolen in the "sporting goods" aisle of Wal-Mart is a whole other issue. Harry Connick, Jr. said on MSNBC this morning, "If I grew up in conditions like this with no hope, I'd be stealing me a plasma tv too," and he said that maybe now the people of the city would wake up to the heartbreaking inequalities all around them.

A representative of Arcadian Ambulance, a private corporation that our government has hired to do its job in evacuating the medically needy out of the Superdome, says that shots were fired at one of their helicopters in the middle of the night so they halted evacuations. We continue to privatize operations that should be done by government, and as a result my husband has to be sent tools in Afghanistan because KBR is in charge of all repairs and yet they don't leave the base and they aren't "authorized" to give tools to soldiers, and the people of New Orleans have to gather by rumor on the outskirts of the dome, hoping the rumor has some thread of truth and they really will be rescued.

"It's like being in a Third World country," said Mitch Handrich, a hospital manager. Yes, and it was before too. Remember those "Louisiana: Third World and Proud of It!" tees and stickers? I almost bought one at a little pack-and-ship outfit across the street from the massive Whole Foods on Magazine Street. I remember those stickers because it struck me then that you get what you pay for, and since the well-to-do New Orleanians hated to pay property taxes, they got to have their massive houses in a city always in crisis. The Garden District was probably spared, for the most part, by the flooding, so those who had the most still do. Again, we knew New Orleans was a poor city with few resources, so why the hell has it taken so long to respond? Were we working out the private contracts? Meanwhile, thousands of lives are lost, and thousands more are at risk right now.

This story could have been about New Orleans or St. Bernard. Many continue to disparage the people stranded in the storm by saying they "chose" to stay in the city out of stubborness. Some did, and apparently that means we don't give a damn about them, because apparently your human worth is determined by your choices. Let's talk about choices, shall we? The administration made the choice to give tax breaks to the rich, leading to an unbelievable deficit, and they made the choice to invade Iraq, leading to the deaths of tens of thousands and even more debt, and perhaps even leaving us here at home more vulnerable to disaster because of a lack of resources. Those are choices. Is it a choice to stay when you have no money to evacuate? Where would you go? How would you get there? How would you feed and house yourself once you did get there? It is a false choice.

On every cable station are the same words, words, words, over and over again. "We've never seen anything like this before," then "This is unprecedented; we've never had anything like this happen in the United States before," all said as an excuse for the images broacast behind the speaker of desperate Americans roaming around their city hungry and thirsty, or standing on top of their roofs waving red and white fabric in an attempt to get our attention. Yes, it's never happened before. Here. It's happened many other places and we've had the opportunity to study their reaction. And then, always, is the reality that this catastrophe had been predicted, it was known. S and I fled Ivan last fall and went to Vicksburg where we stayed with friends for a week. After that storm, as after every storm, there was talk of evacuation plans for the catastrophe that was sure to come with some storm, some day.

But it was earlier still. In 2001 when we first went down to New Orleans to see about moving there, we talked to the Burks, two real estate agents who both came from old money New Orleans families ("I went to Dominican and my husband went to Jesuit," she told us when we first met her). They took us around town, introduced us to the Camillia Grill and explained all of the neighborhoods, and took us to see house after house that they warned would be infested with termites and eventually, inevitably flooded. We were staying at the Avenue Inn in Uptown on majestic St. Charles Avenue, and when we got back to the room exhausted and worried about moving, we turned on the television and then-Mayor Marc Morial was on imploring the city to get out of town if they were told to, pointing to a computer graphic of the bowl of a city filling with water with the first breach or over-topping of a lakeside levee during a heavy storm. It seemed to happen fast in the graphic, I remember, not as slow as it was this week. Yet still I thought about that night in our 200-year-old bed and breakfast after our day of walking through double-shotguns in Uptown and past mid-century ranches in Lakeview, our bellies full from Camillia's grilled chocolate pecan pie, when I first read that the levees had been breached, the city was being flooded. We knew it would happen. And yet all these days later, Americans are stranded in floodwaters.

Today Bush talked about "zero tolerance" toward looters and price gaugers. Yet the entire Gulf Coast is still insecure and unstable. He clearly does not have "zero tolerance" for chaos. We chose to have tolerance for endemic poverty, just as we chose to bankrupt our country with corporate handouts, lining the pockets of private companies who now do the work government once did, just more reluctantly and less efficiently. As a result of the choices we've made, thousands are dead and thousands are suffering. That is what is truly intolerable.