New Orleans Who can believe what has happened in New Orleans and it's satellite towns ? We have all looked on in horror at the abject failure of the American goverment to get to grips with a disaster inside it's own borders. Reporters were still saying that last night, five days after hurricane Katrina, there were people inside the city who had not received water, food or clothing. Aid from the USA had arrived in tsunami affected countries two days after the wave struck, in New Orleans people are dying in the streets and the authorities cannot get their act together. We visited New Orleans last year, it's a really interesting place, full of verve and character, the French Quarter, the Garden District, the cemetaries, it has a lot to see. There is vast poverty in the city and a fair amount of crime, and this is apparent in the advice given to tourists, do not leave the French Quarter on foot after dark, take a taxi, do not enter the cemetaries on your own, do not walk north of this point at any time. We cheerfully ignored most of the advice, went to the cemetaries on foot, walked around around the parks during daylight, the city didn't seem half as dangerous as people made it out to be. How quickley it has shed this veneer of civilization though and descended into bloody anarchy. The scenes of aid arriving were just as disturbing, food and water thrown from helicopters, the young and the fit scrambling, fighting over it, grabbing what they could carry and running off whilst families, mothers with children, the old and infirm, the sick and ill looked on in horror. The BBC reported that nowhere in the city were officials trying to distribute supplies properly, take a census of the living or in any way trying to organise the survivors. Contact with survivors seems to be conducted only with a shotgun pointed at them. Appeals have been set up to help the victims of Katrina, I have heard fools on radio phone-ins saying "why should we help the richest nation on earth ?" These peope are poor, they have no jobs, they have lost their homes, all their posessions except the clothes they wear, they have nothing, not the most basic elements of shelter, water, food and power that we all take for granted in our daily lives. And another reason, we're not flying the nazi swastika and singing the horst wessel song because the USA stood by us in OUR hour of need, now stop being so bloody stupid and stick a pound or two in that tin when someone rattles it. New Orleans in better times..... BBC Appeals page