Casualties

Oh, it’s about race.

And of course the Onion knows it:

White Foragers Report Threat Of Black Looters

NEW ORLEANS--Throughout the Gulf Coast, Caucasian suburbanites attempting to gather food and drink in the shattered wreckage of shopping districts have reported seeing African Americans "looting snacks and beer from damaged businesses." "I was in the abandoned Wal-Mart gathering an air mattress so I could float out the potato chips, beef jerky, and Budweiser I'd managed to find," said white survivor Lars Wrightson, who had carefully selected foodstuffs whose salt and alcohol content provide protection against contamination. "Then I look up, and I see a whole family of [African-Americans] going straight for the booze. Hell, you could see they had already looted a fortune in diapers." Radio stations still in operation are advising store owners and white people in the affected areas to locate firearms in sporting-goods stores in order to protect themselves against marauding blacks looting gun shops.

For more sober thoughts on the racism behind the Feds' pathetic response to New Orleans, check out Amy Goodman's Democracy Now. Here's an excerpt:

New Orleans is a city that is almost 70 percent black with nearly 23 percent of its residents living in poverty. Many African Americans are asking if this calamity would have been allowed to happen if the demographics of the city were different. And they are asking if the response would have been quicker if New Orleans had been a predominately white, wealthy city. On his way to Louisiana a few days ago, Reverend Jesse Jackson said that racial discrimination and indifference to black suffering was at the root of the disaster response. He went on to say, "In this same city of New Orleans where slave ships landed, where the legacy of 246 years of slavery and 100 years of Jim Crow discrimination, that legacy is unbroken today."