Help

I can't stop.
I am reading, watching, listening to anything I can on Katrina. I can't handle it. I feel so impotent at a time when so many people need help, and physically sick to my stomach about the way this "great" nation has failed to rise to meet one of its greatest challenges.
A guy I worked with said ignorantly yesterday, "You can't help people who don't want help." What??? Don't tell me that people without food and water don't want help. Don't tell me that a small lawless minority (that's not counting those looting for food and water as lawless--we would all do the same) is an excuse for a country with the resources we have to not help the hundreds of thousands of innocent victims of this tragedy.
His comment enraged me because I know him, and I know that his views are tainted much more by the color of the faces he is seeing on TV than they are by the behavior of the looters. He sees those that were left behind--the poor, who had no means of leaving--but he doesn't recognize the face of poverty. He sees only race.
For anyone of any income level or any color to die from lack of food or water in the United States in an unbelievable disgrace. For hundreds, maybe thousands, to do so because we respond with only a trickle of National Guardsmen and supplies to perhaps our country's worst natural disaster...that's unspeakable.
There is so much more I want to say about this, but I don't think I can. What it really comes down to is what I told my ignorant co-worker--when people need help, you help them.