"Is this what the pioneers of the civil rights movement fought to achieve, a society where many black people are as trapped and isolated by their poverty as they were by segregation laws? If Sept. 11 showed the power of a nation united in response to a devastating attack, Hurricane Katrina reveals the fault lines of a region and a nation, rent by profound social divisions." -- I'm falling back on my "only one post about ginormous news events" policy, because I am burned out and disgusted by the anarchy unleashed in New Orleans this week. Aside from the storm destruction and the utter moral breakdown in the streets, how dreadful to see just how inept and callous our vaunted "homeland security" really is. Our government....wait, I should say the government, it certainly doesn't seem to belong to the citizenry anymore. The priorities of this government are truly backward if it not only consigns the most helpless people to fend for themselves in a crisis, it also left a critical economic lifeline for the nation basically at the whim of nature, let alone terrorists. And what were they spending time and money on instead? One guess. We will all be paying the price for this for a long time.