Too many people, on all sides of issues, act like humanity is a zero-sum game. If you care about the unborn you can't care about the born, or vice-versa. If you care about terrorism victims you can't care about civilians in Iraq. If you care about crime victims you can't care about the rights of the accused. Because there's only so much human rights and human dignity to go around, don'tcha know, so you have to grab your group's share and everyone else can go to hell.

And yeah, that sucks. Because the way I see it, we're all in this together, and it's up to us to recognize that. And thank goodness, some people do -- a lot of them are on the ground in LA and MS right now. I'm not religious at all, but I certainly appreciate the work that groups like the Salvation Army and Catholic Charities and Mennonite Disaster Services are doing, in addition to the secular groups of course.

What burns me is that people have known for years this could happen, and they've known what they needed to do about it. But funding for strengthening the levees has dried up in recent years because that money was being wasted spent elsewhere.