Tragedy in New Orleans

I'm having a hard time expressing myself. Partly--how the hell do you do something like this any justice? Partly shock. Partly inarticulate grief. New Orleans is exactly east of Austin, just 10 hours. Less than half a day away is hell on earth. Our most beautiful city in ruins, the ecosphere contaminated by biological agents from rotting flesh and chemical agents from flooded oil refineries, human misery compounding hourly, number of survivors actually dropping.
People have tried to compare Katrina to 9/11. The only similarity is that they are both grand scale tragedies. The attacks on New York and D.C. were fast, and unanticipated. New York did not lose power, plumbing or food deliveries on a wide scale. Order was never really lost-- there was the understanding that the city had been attacked. That tends to draw people together-- a common enemy. Katrina we saw coming. Those who could evacuate, did. Those who remained behind experienced a terrifying storm, followed by a hellish aftermath. Ongoing misery, hunger, thirst-- these all tend to bring out the worst in people. Those looting televisions must be idiots, or in deep denial. They have yet to realize how low on the list of priorities material luxeries become in a crisis. They are weighing themselves down with useless objects. Pretty much everything in the city limits is an insurance loss.
Dubya is dispatching troops to restore order, with a special emphasis on stopping looters. Ok, looting VERY BAD, but might we focus on getting people the hell out of there, so maybe they won't need to rummage through things that aren't theirs for survival? How fucking dare anyone place more value on inanimate objects that human suffering? How the hell does that work? The first and only priority should be delivering our fellow man from harm. If ya wanna go back for yer stuff afterward, ok. But it's probably not worth having anymore, between water damage, mold, etc-- seriously.
I hope we will learn from this, and make New Orleans a better, safer city. I hope she will be the first city in the US to ban guns outright. With the obscene murder rate, and the assaults on rescue workers, I think we've witnessed what a bad idea our love affair with firearms really is. Everytime we have a tragedy involving firearms--Columbine, for instance-- gun lobbyists froth on about guns being a good thing that preserve our freedom. Bullshit, ya'll. If it weren't for the sniping at helicopters and trucks, more people would be less miserable. We need to wake up to the nightmare that an armed populace is. Nature gives us enough trouble--we shouldn't ought to compound it.