Hey, wasn't all this stuff supposed to happen for Y2K?

I was thinking, okay, enough hurricane-aftermath-chaos porn. But I don't think there's too much you can say about this whole situation.

Let's review.

How many people are homeless? 200,000? 400,000? No one really knows, yet.

Of those, at least 100,000 were already desperately poor, and now whatever resources they had are utterly lost. If you were to imagine how to rehabilitate those people, you'd have to start thinking about redressing years of bad medical care, little education, bad diet, and few job skills. How do you take that many people and feed, house and educate them for the next five years while simultaneously providing them free medical care that not only treats their immediate problems but redresses years of neglect?

(Second thought, a few hours later: Come to think of it, though, the desperate poor confined in the Superdome or now scattered throughout the Gulf Coast region (not to mention the dead) -- they don't need these things because of the hurricane -- they've always needed, and lacked, decent housing, education, health care, job training and food.)

The economic impact is incalcuable, but having a third of the nation's oil supply and refineries out of commission for months will have a ripple effect throughout the economy. Never mind gas prices -- I mean food prices, the already struggling airline industry, insurance -- the mind reels. One million unemployed.

If you're a politician in the affected areas, your political career is toast. Forget about it.

The events of September 11, 2001 took 90 minutes to happen and were endlessly played out on television. This disaster is still happening; it is still getting worse. It is a preview of what might happen if, for example, a single nuclear weapon were to be set off in a U.S. city. Instantly all infrastructure, all government, for an entire region collapses.

I don't know if people are learning any lessons from this experience. In a way, I wouldn't be surprised if, ten years from now, it's only vaguely remembered. Not because we will have fixed everything and be back to "normal," but because, perhaps, we won't have learned a thing and instead will prefer to forget it happened at all.