Hurricane Katrina Refugee

With all of the reporters vying to top one another with apocalyptic descriptions of the destruction of Katrina, I found the Hurricane Katrina Refugee blog all the more powerful in its simplicity.

Television reporters take note -- when you let your rhetoric become too overblown, you trivialize the event. Looking closely at individual situations, then realizing that each one can be multiplied by thousands of people creates an accurate image of life there. Here is not someone who has lost everything, but rather someone who still doesn't know what she has lost. No dramatic rooftop rescue, no giant wave of shots of debris, just the anxiety of one family.

Headlines like "Thousands homeless" communicate little next to "So basically, we're refugees. We have nowhere to live at the moment and will probably spend the next month shuffeling from relative to relative."

Hat tip to Poliblog.