The anniversary of the hurricane Katrina that destroyed New Orleans happened this week. There has been much hullabaloo about the recovery efforts, the heart-warming human interest stories surrounding the victims, all that crap. Truth be told, I know what it is like to be a hurricane survivor, and I also know what it is like to live through the aftermath of being forcibly removed from your demolished home, leaving everything you own behind. I know what the authorities do for you, that unless there is a shotgun to their heads, they will do as little as they can get by with.

FEMA was ill-prepared when hurricane Jean wrecked my home in Cape Canaveral the previous year. Sadly, in spite of knowing that every year without fail they will have to respond to at least one big storm related disaster, they were just as inept and incompetent when Katrina struck New Orleans. The only thing that FEMA responded to was public pressure, and when that finally happened, everybody started to realize that FEMA really didn’t know how to respond. Nobody ever told them that they would have to do more than write checks for $700 per homeless person. They still have trailer homes that were probably bought through some brother-in-law deal that have not been distributed to the people who need them.

The lesson I learned from hurricane Jean was to move the fuck away from anyplace that might ever stand even a remote chance of becoming a disaster site. And while my living situation has not improved since I lost my home in Cape Canaveral, at least I am reasonably assured that my camp site in Tucson will not be swallowed up by a 7.6 magnitude earthquake or washed away by violent tides and hundred-mile-per-hour winds.

Latest statistics in this great country of mine is that 13.3% of the population lives at or below the poverty level, a line drawn somewhat arbitrarily and artificially optimistically at somewhere around $7000 per year. This means that one-in-eight people here don’t even have enough money to rent a roach motel room, let alone afford a car payment and the mandatory insurance. And you know what? Nobody cares. That is until the spotlight focuses on a large number of these poor people stranded in places like New Orleans after Katrina wrecked what little they had of lives. And you know what else? Nobody would even care about that except for the other seven-of-eight people who had money yet still lost homes and businesses there, as it seems in all fairness that Katrina didn’t give a shit about whose homes she demolished.