I should know better

Hard to know what to say about the New Orleans disaster. I never visited it - never got that far south - and it`s eerie to think of a huge city only living by the power of huge pumps and levees. Living on borrowed time, I suppose.

But five days! Five days before proper federal aid arrived and meanwhile all those pictures of starving Africans in a destitute third world country - no, wait, I mean abandoned citizens of a great and prosperous superpower.... can`t think how I got so confused by appearances.

There`s nothing to compare with here. We are lucky not to have those extremes of weather. The last extreme weather emergency we had was the flash flood which destroyed the little town of Boscastle - a tiny blip compared with the huge Louisiana disaster. Yet I seem to remember that the rescue operation - a military one - was in action within 40 minutes of the first reports.

Five days. With everyone blaming everyone else and passing on the responsibility. What happened to the legendary sign on the Presidential desk that said - "the buck stops here"?

I understand that the financing of disaster management has been drastically cut, and that in America global warming and its effects on climate don`t officially exist.

It all seems very alien to me. But my heart goes out to those poor abandoned people ( who somehow didn`t look to me like typical Republican voters.)

And my heart goes out to America, beset by natural disasters like tornadoes, hurricanes - and the Bush administration.