New Orleans

It’s easy as you sit reading this to forget all things not Internet. We all have our work to do, there’s always another email, another web site.

But people, people who up until this week had jobs and money and homes and belongings and normal lives need your help. Right now. In New Orleans and Gulfport and a hundred towns and cities you’ve never heard of.

This is not Sri Lanka or Banda Ache or Iraq or the Sudan. This is happening right here, right now, In the United States of America.

“We have a major American city, a major urban area, totally demolished.” said FEMA Director Mike Brown on CNN a moment ago. The enormity of this disaster is just starting to become clear, but the momentum of this disaster is far outstripping all of the relief efforts the federal, state and local governments can mobilize. There will be time, and there will be a time, to hold those accountable for the part of this catastrophe that could have been prevented accountable. But that is later.

Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of Americans have died. Thousands more will die in the next few days and hundreds of thousands of people have had lives, their hopes, wiped out.

What can you do? Go to the American Red Cross’s site at http://www.redcross.org/ and donate. Now. It’s not much, but multiplied a millionfold, multiplied by talking to your friends who are making jokes and checking out the latest web site, it will be a start.

Because this disaster, and what the rest of us do right now, will define this country for the next 20 years.