Security and Help at Home

Close to 5 million people live in the devastated coastal areas of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. About 26 million people live in Iraq.

We’ve got more than 118,000 National Guardsmen and women on active duty either in Iraq or supporting war efforts there, which clearly makes the number of people available for our own disaster-relief services smaller.

We’ve got about 4,300 National Guard currently supporting the cleanup efforts from Hurricane Katrina, now believed to be even more catastrophic in human and economic terms than Hurricane Andrew.

Where is the perspective?

New Orleans, a city in OUR country is 80 percent underwater. People will be without power for as long as a month. Thousands will be homeless for even longer.

These are OUR people – people whose taxes help support the staggering costs of the war in Iraq – people who now should be able to count on us and our government for the assistance they so desparately need.

Yet on Saturday, General Schoomaker, the Army’s top general, said he “is making plans to keep the current number of soldiers in Iraq -- well over 100,000 -- for four more years.”

What are we doing?

We have two million people without power. We have fellow countrymen and women whose lives have been as upturned as those in Banda Ache after the Tsunami.

We need help here. We need a government that remembers it is supposed to be “for the people.”

In the meantime, we, as individuals can remember and can help.

• American Red Cross 800–help now
  
• Operation Blessing 800-436-6348
  
• America’s Second Harvest 344-8070
  

A more complete list of where to donate is at CNN.

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Written in collaboration with Jennifer Hicks