Including me. Americans ARE stupid. When you know that a wall of water is coming and you don’t haul ass outta there - that’s stupid. When there’s help for the asking and you don’t ask - that’s stupid. When you abuse your authority to keep rescuers at bay - that’s stupid. When it is commonly accepted that Katrina was somehow Bush’s fault - that’s monumentally stupid.
The media made things worse by declaring that people were dying by the thousands in the dome and even pimping stories of bodies stacked like cordwood and even cannibalism.
I remember seeing some photo journal by a foreign tourist who was in NO at the time. They were amazed that the locals didn’t seem to think there was something wrong with ankle deep water and when it got knee deep they just started looting. When the tourists got to the dome they were being threatened so they stole a car and got the hell out of town.
It was a shameful chapter in American history that mostly began and ended right there in NO but FEMA did the bureaucratic thing and screwed things up even more.