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It's interesting to see those members of the media on the scene who have become victims, with all the hysteria and astonishment of that unhappy state of mind.

Anderson Cooper, who did relatively well covering relatively small storms in Florida last year acts like he doesn't have a home to eventually go home to. Geraldo, who just got there yesterday, and especially Shep need to come home. They have become storm victims.

Contrast that with Orlando Salinas and Rick Kaplan who have remained sober minded and circumspect about the simple fact that one reporter in a 90,000 square miles DON'T have a grip on the scope of this unusually vast storm of this magnitude. And the anchors, man. It's shameful how each of them thinks they have the resourses of the President.

What a mess. Consider the following, posted to a blog earlier today.

joelraupe.blogspot.com

INSIDE OUT

New Orleans has, quite literally, been turned inside out, and America has had some of its most terrible national vulnerabilities exposed for the world to see. Our enemies are taking notes. We better be taking some notes, too.

It will be more difficult for people to ignore explicit hurricane warnings for at least a generation, so harping on the accuracy of the National Hurricane Center’s predictions of what would happen when this storm came ashore is pointless. Whether this renewed respect for the National Weather Service is transferable to the other agencies we pay to warn us remains to be seen.

The chattering classes have also had thrust upon them an unnerving look at America’s urban underclass, washed out from behind the curtain and shaken out on the living room floor. That’s the same New Orleans that was always there, by the way. It’s just been turned inside out. It’s not a pretty picture.

Among the working poor came the gangs and the addicts and all that they could carry through the floodwaters, and now they are angry, we are being told. They were angry before, of course, but now they are storm victims, with all the attendant trauma and dumbfounded astonishment that accompanies that unhappy state of mind and being.

A lot of people watching from a distance are angry for them, some with some sort of bizarre guilt and misdirected anger less for the victims, I would imagine, than for some sense that somebody, somewhere, has made a terrible mistake.

But this is not Chernobyl. A lot of people made a choice to be, or just happened to be, in the wrong place at the wrong time and lightning struck. There is plenty of the uniquely human kind of outrageous stupidity to go around, but FEMA isn't the problem.

Unless, of course, governments tend to foster dependence. Afterall, FEMA's original primary mission is COG, or "Continuity of Government," not search and rescue.

In Mississippi and Alabama, where the largest storm surge ever recorded has swept away whole communities and families, there is anger too. Anyone who has ever sat upon the ground in the stillness of the ruins after these storms understands how it feels to have the startlingly thin veneer of modern civilization ripped away. Patience does eventually transform to discomfort and then to fear, which manifests itself as anger as first the hours, then the days and then the weeks pass by and the illusion of self-sufficiency brings both humility and humiliation.

All the anger is useless, of course, but reason gives way at times like these. It’s important, however, all the more to rely on reason. Especially by all of us who are trying to help. It is reasonable, for example, to understand that nature is not your mother and government is not your father.

The 1900 Galveston Hurricane began the transformation of the National Weather Bureau from a meteorological survey into something that gives people warning of the impending arrival of killer storms. Hurricane Andrew in 1992 demonstrated the value of building codes and satellites, but it also showed the powerlessness of government to come to the aid of the storm’s victims in a timely fashion.

We’re going to learn a lot from Katrina. Not all of it will be welcome. None of it will be pretty.

If this is a preview of how America’s governments are prepared to react in the aftermath of a nuclear attack on a single city, for example, in a scenario more likely than a wholesale nuclear war these days, then this dress rehearsal is not very encouraging. Some of those problems, now exposed for our enemies to see, may be beyond fixing until long after it’s too late.

Andrew taught the federal government to preposition relief supplies and reduce response and rescue time by many days, but that’s not going to be good enough for some people.

For others, it begs the question of what would be good enough?

It demonstrates the stark reality that people, families, and communities need to prepare to take care of themselves for some reasonable period of time before disaster strikes. And I don’t mean by buying flood insurance.

Katrina is going to teach us a lot about New Orleans, and New Orleans will show us how quickly local governments, and then state governments, can simply collapse. In comparison to the magnitude of a such a vast and powerful storm, governments are simply frauds, and always were, and the indulgence of their constituents alone keeps them afloat.

This disaster has exposed a People who are too dependent on government and who become helpless when government staggers. It has exposed one of many of America’s Great Cities who have among their people some who will immediately turn on authorities when the support they voted to support fails, even momentarily.

For Americans to rely upon one another, we must also be able to rely on ourselves. As anyone who takes on the responsibility of being a part of a family knows, you can’t help others when you can’t help yourself.