Staying on topic ...Never forget that humans suck,and everything is our fault

The American left is getting very good at feigning sympathy while pointing a blaming finger. A half-million residents of New Orleans have fled their beloved city ahead of the approaching hurricane, and "experts" and environmentalists think now is a good time to suggest that they shouldn't have lived there in the first place.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa. We built a city, erected walls to save it from a flooding river. Oh why, oh why didn't we listen to those "experts" and stay in the trees and caves? Life was so good back in the Pleistocene, when nothing bad ever happened.

"Let's sing a song, of long ago/When things were green, and movin' slow."

The Associated Press called up the ubiquitous doomsday-predicters to harangue us about how we've been screwing things up ever since we tried walking upright:

Experts have also warned that the ring of high levees around New Orleans, designed to protect the city from floodwaters coming down the Mississippi, will only make things worse in a powerful hurricane.

I love the way these experts don't seem to have any constructive suggestions. Their advice always seems to boil down to "leave things alone and go somewhere else." The safety of inaction is just too appealing for the self-hating left to resist. The wetlands would have saved us. Reminds me of environmentalists who claimed after last year's tsunami that the coastal populations would have been safe if they had left the shoreline's ancient mangrove swamps intact and not lived on the coast. Sounds like a great idea, except for the fact that most of those people have long depended on fishing and tourism to live. "Honey, let's visit a mangrove swamp in southeast Asia this Christmas! And then we can spend New Years at the the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta!"

Katrina is expected to push a 28-foot storm surge against the levees. Even if they hold, water will pour over their tops and begin filling the city as if it were a sinking canoe.

Make that, "a sinking canoe constructed by a plague species."

Last night Euronews showed impressive images of the parking lots surrounding New Orleans' sports stadium packed with row upon row of ambulances, cherry pickers, and other emergency vehicles. Workers readied their gear, filled sandbags, and loaded their cars with water and first-aid supplies. Residents calmly and patiently evacuated the city. This is civilization. We do not cower at the dark forest's edge or shrink in fear from adversity. Despite the dire predictions of the "experts," I know that these people will return to their homes and rebuild, no matter how terrible the damage. The price we pay for being brave enough to build is that we must sometimes rebuild. This is nothing new, and it is a facet of human nature that we should celebrate, not denegrate.

My thoughts are with the people facing Katrina's wrath. If you wish to donate to the relief effort, call the Red Cross (1-800-HELP-NOW) and donate. [Update: I was wrong to suggest earlier that the American Red Cross should be avoided--they have nothing to do with the sins of the Internation Red Cross. See my post above on this error and correction.] Or call the Salvation Army (1-800 SAL-ARMY) and donate to their efforts.

(The lyrics in the image caption above are from Randy Newman's "Dayton, Ohio, 1903." The image is from a mural by Taylor Studios for the South Florida Museum.)