You'd Do the Same for Me

People are helping. What's clear so far about the Katrina catastrophe is that people all across America and the world were ready and willing to help, and once they were given the chance, they are helping.

Now in the area are search and rescue teams from Oakland, CA and scientists from the Bay Area testing the water in flooded New Orleans to see what health problems may yet arise. There are National Guard troops from West Virginia, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania as well as nearby states.

US neighbors are responding. Canada sent the HMCS Athabascan from Halifax. Mexico is sending medical teams. Cuba has offered 1100 doctors. The UN is organizing a world response.

Survivors are being welcomed into homes in cities and towns all over America. Baton Rouge has doubled in population, so have some Misssippi towns, and Houston and Dallas are taking thousands. But other places, like Des Moines, Iowa and Charlotte, North Carolina; Los Angeles, Phoenix, Baltimore and Chicago, are welcoming survivors and planning for short-term and long-term care.

Civilization is nothing more and nothing less than a society's commitment to certain values, reflected in its philosophies, institutions and actions, renewed and extended continually.

The world saw civilization break down in the Katrina zone, though this breakdown was caused by a criminal lack of committment and action in Washington, and perhaps elsewhere.

Now civilization is reasserting itself with the principal civic value, which can't be expressed any better than in the phrase, "You'd do the same for me."