The city's poor, left behind in a state that called for a mandatory evacuation, but had no plans for their evacuation -- those without cars or SUVs or money for plane fare. We're watching an American Somalia -- children, including infants, pregnant women, old people and young people huddled together in a filthy, anarchic hell for five days without food or water -- the sick and the exhausted, mothers and fathers, thrown together with the criminal elements of a city where 7 in ten are Black, and of those, three in ten were poor even before the storm. In our American Somalia, women have much to fear when darkness falls -- in the pitch black they must fear robbery and rape. There are no receiving stations inside that convention center in New Orleans. There are no triage areas, no police guards, no National Guardsmen handing out MREs, water and ice. There is just the teeming masses of the uncared for -- the good and the bad, the sick and the well, forced to face the darkness together, and alone. This is New Orleans, in America.

Let's not fool ourselves. If the floodwaters had taken Liberty City or Opa-locka, Florida, the south side of Chicago, Red Hook or Watts, in California, or the ghettos of Washington D.C., would things have been any different? We are a nation that roots our poor out of our consciousness. We do the Rush Limbaugh, snorting that no one forced them to live that way. For all our puffery about being the most churchgoing and Godly of Western nations, we spend the least on the world's poor, the least on our own. A Census Bureau report showing poverty rising for the fourth straight year in 2004 and claiming nearly 13 percent of the American population passed almost without comment in America last Tuesday. Nearly a quarter of Black and Hispanic children go hungry every night, hurricane or no hurricane, in America. And we have abandoned the left-behind of an entire city -- condemning them even to death, in America.

A singer, Harry Connick Jr., managed to ignore the warnings of authorities and drive into New Orleans to set eyes on the left behind of his hometown, while the president flew 1,700 miles overhead. There was no fireman's mound for Mr. Bush this time. But his tardiness to the scene was a true echo of 9/11. In America the president demands "zero tolerance" for looting, but not "zero tolerance" for want. National Guardsmen who face down insurgents in Iraq are told it's too dangerous to face the angry, abandoned and desperate Americans in New Orleans.

And now the superpower will go begging to the world for aid. The French have offered planes and ships. Germany and Venezuela have offered condolences, help, and wry "I told you so's." Our shame is to pass the hat to the world we used to sneer at. We sure hope they're "with us" now. And we, who spend less than 1 percent of our gross national product on the world's poor, and dwindling sums on our own, with every budget and every fat corporate tax break, seem not to have enough money to save 15,000 Americans in New Orleans. Congress has offered $10 billion -- two and a half weeks' worth of war in Iraq. Is this who we are? Is this America?

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