Boggles the mind...

Given all the hoopla, tooth gnashing and hair-pulling over Katrina that we would have learned and made adjustments in our response times to natural disasters. Given that natural disasters can, and do, happen at any time and anywhere with little or NO warning, we should have made those adjustments when they were identified and made our response time that much quicker.

Apparently not.

Bush is not longer in office. The great O is there and is making everything better with all of his Hope and Change. But still, the people of Haiti are not seeing any relief.

I can hear the replies: "...can't get into the airport..." "...the streets are clogged and blocked..." "...efforts of this magnitude take a bit of time to coordinate..." which were all excuses also given while people in New Orleans were languishing in the flood waters and dying. Others will get huffy with, "There are people, supplies and stuff just sitting at the airport trying to get through!" These will be the same people who ignored the fact that there were truckloads of water, food and ice sitting just north of New Orleans and weren't allowed in to help for DAYS.

We will get help to the people in Haiti. It is going to take a while yet to get there. Days even. And in that amount of time additional people will needlessly die. And until we can get operating bases there that will allow us to helicopter people and supplies into areas that are currently unreachable, there is little else we can do.

Later, when the dust settles and the final tally is taken, we will look back to see what we could have done better and faster to get help to these people and I will bet that the list will look almost the same as the failures that we saw in the face of Katrina. The difference being that the blame will not be laid at the feet of our sitting president by a rabid, unscrupulous and definitely biased press. You will not hear the racist claims.

In the mean time, do what you can. Volunteer, work with your churches, give blood, donate clothes, and the Red Cross can always use cash. Above all: pray.