Obviously you are free to think anything you wish about anyone you wish. I only wonder at the hostility displayed and wonder if, as I wrote earlier, does the hurricane need help? Do we really think that simply thinking of other people as stupid without knowing the hows or the whys of what they did or didn't do is a good thing?

There's a rule in football about not piling on, it's purpose is to keep a violent game from becoming a sadistic game. Seems like a good idea in general to me.

I've seen more than my share of devastation in my earlier career as a photojournalist, both natural disasters and war show little mercy towards those who either by fate or by being "stupid" end up on the front lines. I suppose that I like to think that we as people, can be better than that. Maybe we can't.

Perhaps those 15,000 souls you mentioned, like many people here, simply didn't believe the news reports or the newspapers when they were warned to go. Maybe all of them had a friend of a friend who got misquoted once and that convinced them that the media lies to the people all the time. How were they to know that this time it was true? Maybe they sat back and thought the news media were simply being stupid, trying to scare them into leaving their homes. Who knows?

Is the purpose of the ETS forums to learn and to share or is it to crow about our achievements in obtaining some mythical sense of well being cause we think we're "prepared"?

Does being empathetic demean me in some way that I'm unaware? Am I a lesser person for not calling those less fortunate names?

I guess I just don't get it.

John E

"
"the snow doesn't give a soft white damn whom it touches"

E.E. Cummings