Hurricane Katrina has signed her name across the face of the Gulf Coast.  Thousands are homeless, hundreds are missing and presumed dead, the very trappings of modern existence have been swept away and strewn across the landscape by the wrathful hand of Nature.  Fittingly, it is New Orleans, a perfect microcosm of the consumer "culture" gone mad which spawned the disaster in the first place, that the attention of the US and the world is now riveted to.

New Orleans, The Big Easy, City of jazz, miscegenation and the beads-for-boobs barter system.  Now, in a delightfully ironic twist of fate, it lies drowning in it's own filth and wracked by chaos as its negro community takes advantage of the storm's aftermath to steal television sets and other talismans of the cult of money.

The horror!  People living without electricity, at the mercy of Nature!  Of course, the government is rushing to rectify the situation.  And, as usual, private charities are cashing in on the parade of sympathy squeezed out of a well trained and socialized populace, ever ready to fork over their cash to a "worth cause" without every stopping to think whether the cause really is worthy.

Inevitably, in the rush to "Save New Orleans," things that should be painfully obvious are overlooked.  Namely, that New Orleans and all the places like it, traffic choked cesspools dumping hydrocarbons into the atmosphere, are the reason that hurricanes like Katrina are increasing rapidly both in numbers and in ferocity.  The West, as typified by New Orleans, long ago traded in an inheritance of greatness for the easy comfort of the automobile, the microwave and the television set (and through Western military might, this insane lifestyle has been forced upon the entire world).

This trade off has not been without catastrophic costs.  Biodiversity is sacrificed at every turn to fill empty souls with plastic dreams.  Human cultural diversity has likewise declined in the face of the spread of the consumerist money culture.  Everywhere we are fouling our own nest, turning our water to sewage and the air we breathe into a carcinogenic misama. 

And, the hydrocarbons from our automobiles and the power plants that light our homes and keep the boob tube running are turning the planet into a sauna.  Global warming means just that, global warming.  And this includes warming the waters at the surface of the ocean, which, as any idiot who has taken an intro atmospheric sciences course should be able to tell you, means more hurricanes.

But, of course, in our rush to pat ourselves on the back for our admirable pity and empathy, this truth will be lost.  Money will pour in and New Orleans will be rebuilt.  The city's cars and refineries will once again spew toxic sludge into the air, and the next hurricane will just be that much bigger (and come that much sooner).  And we'll only have ourselves to blame.