Reply #39: I think it was a combination of compassion and faith.

[intheflow]

My mother's pea-sized town in Michigan got some survivors, as did small towns across the U.S. Say what you will about the Christian right, they do run soup kitchens and homeless shelters. I think you would have to have a heart of stone like Bush and Cheney to not be moved by the images out of NOLA after the storm. I think most Americans, right and left, were moved to help in any way they could.

The disturbing part to me is that the federal government didn't keep track of who and how many people went where. Families were broken up and evacuated to different parts of the country, or people who evacuated only to return home to no house just left. No one has ever, to my knowledge, looked at anything like, say, postal records to see who lived at each address and make an effort to find them, record where they fled to. Such a data base would be invaluable for many reasons: tracking the economic impact in other regions from the influx of Katrina survivors, reuniting friends and in some cases families (yes, even after all this time), I'm sure there are other reasons.