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.