conuly

On overwhelmed cops

Law Officers, Overwhelmed, Are Quitting the Force
By JOSEPH B. TREASTER

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 3 - Reeling from the chaos of this overwhelmed city, at least 200 New Orleans police officers have walked away from their jobs and two have committed suicide, police officials said on Saturday.

Some officers told their superiors they were leaving, police officials said. Others worked for a while and then stopped showing up. Still others, for reasons not always clear, never made it in after the storm.

The absences come during a period of extraordinary stress for the New Orleans Police Department. For nearly a week, many of its 1,500 members have had to work around the clock, trying to cope with flooding, an overwhelming crush of refugees, looters and occasional snipers.

P. Edwin Compass III, the superintendent of police, said most of his officers were staying at their posts. But in an unusual note of sympathy for a top police official, he said it was understandable that many were frustrated. He said morale was "not very good."

"If I put you out on the street and made you get into gun battles all day with no place to urinate and no place to defecate, I don't think you would be too happy either," Mr. Compass said in an interview. "Our vehicles can't get any gas. The water in the street is contaminated. My officers are walking around in wet shoes."

Fire Department officials said they did not know of any firefighters who had quit. But they, too, were sympathetic to struggling emergency workers.

W. J. Riley, the assistant superintendent of police, said there were about 1,200 officers on duty on Saturday. He said the department was not sure how many officers had decided to abandon their posts and how many simply could not get to work.

Mr. Riley said some of the officers who left the force "couldn't handle the pressure" and were "certainly not the people we need in this department."

He said, "The others are not here because they lost a spouse, or their family or their home was destroyed."

Police officials did not identify the officers who took their lives, one on Saturday and the other the day before. But they said one had been a patrol officer, who a senior officer said "was absolutely outstanding." The other was an aide to Mr. Compass. The superintendent said his aide had lost his home in the hurricane and had been unable to find his family.

Because of the hurricane, many police officers and firefighters have been isolated and unable to report for duty. Others evacuated their families and have been unable to get back to New Orleans.

Still, some officers simply appear to have given up.

A Baton Rouge police officer said he had a friend on the New Orleans force who told him he threw his badge out a car window in disgust just after fleeing the city into neighboring Jefferson Parish as the hurricane approached. The Baton Rouge officer would not give his name, citing a department policy banning comments to the news media.

The officer said he had also heard of an incident in which two men in a New Orleans police cruiser were stopped in Baton Rouge on suspicion of driving a stolen squad car. The men were, in fact, New Orleans officers who had ditched their uniforms and were trying to reach a town in north Louisiana, the officer said.

"They were doing everything to get out of New Orleans," he said. "They didn't have the resources to do the job, or a plan, so they left."

The result is an even heavier burden on those who are patrolling the street, rescuing flood victims and trying to fight fires with no running water, no electricity, no reliable telephones.

Police and fire officials have been begging federal authorities for assistance and criticizing a lack of federal response for several days.

"We need help," said Charles Parent, the superintendent of the Fire Department. Mr. Parent again appealed in an interview on Saturday for replacement fire trucks and radio equipment from federal authorities. And Mr. Compass again appealed for more federal help.

"When I have officers committing suicide," Mr. Compass said, "I think we've reached a point when I don't know what more it's going to take to get the attention of those in control of the response."

The National Guard has come under criticism for not moving more quickly into New Orleans. Lt. Gen. H Steven Blum, the head of the National Guard Bureau, told reporters on Saturday that the Guard had not moved in sooner because it had not anticipated the collapse of civilian law enforcement.

Some patrol officers said morale had been low on the force even before the hurricane. One patrolman said the complaints included understaffing and a lack of equipment.

"We have to use our own shotguns," said the patrolman, who did not want to be identified by name. "This isn't theirs; this is my personal gun."

Another patrol officer said that many of the officers who had quit were younger, inexperienced officers who were overwhelmed by the task.

Some officers have expressed anger at colleagues who have stopped working. "For all you cowards that are supposed to wear the badge," one officer said on Fox News, "are you truly - can you truly wear the badge, like our motto said?"

The Police and Fire Departments are being forced to triage the calls they get for help.

The firefighters are simply not responding to some fires. In some cases, they cannot get through the flooding. But in others, they decide not to send trucks because they are needed for more serious fires.

"We can't fight every fire the way we did in the past and try to put it out," Superintendent Parent told a group of firefighters on Saturday morning at a promotion ceremony in the Algiers section of New Orleans, a dry area.

Even facing much more work than could possibly be handled, he said, it was important for him to take time out for two promotion ceremonies.

"The men need reinforcement," said Mr. Parent, who put on his last clean uniform shirt for the ceremonies elevating 22 officers to the rank of captain. "They need to see their leader and understand that the department is still here and not going to pot."

Another one on income disparities

In Manhattan, Poor Make 2¢ for Each Dollar to the Rich
By SAM ROBERTS

Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue is only about 60 blocks from the Wagner Houses in East Harlem, but they might as well be light years apart. They epitomize the highest- and lowest-earning census tracts in Manhattan, where the disparity between rich and poor is now greater than in any other county in the country.

That finding, in an analysis conducted for The New York Times, dovetails with other new regional economic research, which identifies the Bronx as the poorest urban county in the country and suggests that the middle class in New York State is being depleted.

The top fifth of earners in Manhattan now make 52 times what the lowest fifth make - $365,826 compared with $7,047 - which is roughly comparable to the income disparity in Namibia, according to the Times analysis of 2000 census data. Put another way, for every dollar made by households in the top fifth of Manhattan earners, households in the bottom fifth made about 2 cents.

That represents a substantial widening of the income gap from previous years. In 1980, the top fifth of earners made 21 times what the bottom fifth made in Manhattan, which ranked 17th among the nation's counties in income disparity.

By 1990, Manhattan ranked second behind Kalawao County, Hawaii, a former leper colony with which it had little in common except for that signature grove of palm trees at the World Financial Center. The rich in Manhattan made 32 times the average of the poor then, or $174,486 versus $5,435.

The analysis was conducted for The Times by Dr. Andrew A. Beveridge, a sociology professor at Queens College of the City University of New York.

The growing disparity in Manhattan helped drive New York from 11th among cities with the biggest income disparities in 1980 to fifth in 1990 and fourth in 2000, behind Atlanta; Berkeley, Calif.; and Washington, according to the analysis. "The gains are all going to the top," Dr. Beveridge said. "It's a massive class disparity."

Last week, the Census Bureau reported that even as the economy grew around the nation, incomes stagnated and poverty rates rose. The Bronx, with a poverty rate of 30.6 percent, was outranked only by three border counties in Texas where living costs are lower.

Swollen, in part, by the earnings of commuters who work in New York City, median household income among the states was highest in New Jersey ($61,359) and Connecticut ($60,528). It was $47,349 in New York State, also above the national median.

A separate analysis, being released this weekend by the Fiscal Policy Institute in Albany, warns that the middle class is being depleted while the rich are getting richer and the poor are growing in number and barely getting by - more so in New York State and particularly upstate.

The loss of good-paying jobs, especially in manufacturing, "has meant that the 'hollowing out' of the middle of the income distribution continued at a rapid pace," the institute, a union-backed research group, concluded. It said the number of families earning between $35,000 and $150,000 declined by 50,000 from 2000 to 2003 while the number that earned above $150,000 and below $35,000 increased.

Dr. Mark Levitan, senior policy analyst for the Community Service Society, a liberal research and advocacy group, said he did not believe the city's economy was "uniquely weak," but said an increase in the poverty rate from 19 percent to 20.3 percent, as measured by the census's new American Community Survey, "is fundamentally a story about stagnant wages."

Edward Wolff, a New York University economist, attributed the growing disparity to ballooning Wall Street incomes and declining wages for lower skilled workers. "Though these forces are at work across the country," he said, "the heavy preponderance of corporate headquarters, the financial sector and the legal sector in New York City has made the increase in the ratio of income between the top and bottom quintile more extreme than in other parts of the country."

Jared Bernstein, senior economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, said the income gap, which in Manhattan has historically been large, can endure indefinitely.

"The elites, the top sliver of the income scale, can drive consumption and investment forward while the bottom half slogs along," he said. "If inequality had embedded within it its own seeds of destruction, it would implode sooner than later. But that doesn't appear to be the case. Many who have fallen behind have a skewed notion of their prospects for upward mobility."

Manhattan, he said, is "an amplified microcosm" of conditions elsewhere in the country.

The income gap in Manhattan was far wider than in any other county. In tiny Clay County, Georgia, which has only 1,355 households and ranked second, the rich, on average, made about 38 times what the poor made.

Compared with the poorest Manhattanites, those in the top fifth are disproportionately male, non-Hispanic white and married. Roughly equal proportions among rich and poor are immigrants, are employed by private profit-making companies and work in sales.

The lowest-income census tract in the city is a triangular patch of East Harlem east of First Avenue and north of East 119th Street, where, despite a hint of gentrification in a renovated brownstone or two, the neighborhood is dominated by the mammoth though generally well-tended public housing project called the Wagner Houses. The median household income there is $9,320, most of the residents are black or Hispanic and do not have high school degrees, 56 percent live below the poverty level and about one in 10 are foreign born.

Darryl Powell, a 43-year-old automobile mechanic, said that most were struggling just to get by. "They're trying to keep a roof over their head," he said. "People are trying to hold onto what they've got."

Sheila Estep said she was facing eviction because she was working as a full-time mother raising three sons rather than returning to her earlier jobs as an electrician, plumber and cosmetologist. "If I fail at my job, they'll fail at theirs," she said.

Sharon Hammond, who sells cosmetics, said she and other tenants wished their neighborhood were better and that she had a working stove instead of a temporary hotplate in her apartment, but added: "Everybody can't be rich."

Manhattan's highest-income census tract is a six-square-block rectangle bounded by Fifth and Park Avenues and East 56th and 59th Streets. The median household income in this mostly commercial section of East Midtown is $188,697 (average family income is $875,267); none of the residents identified themselves as black; nearly one-third have advanced degrees and more than one in three are foreign born. Even there, though, the poverty rate is 16 percent.

"The income gap, while supposedly increasing, seems to be a natural phenomenon," said the developer Donald J. Trump, who lives in Trump Tower. "Times have been good, but times have been good for many people and many classes of people. I think there is a very large middle class - but not in this section, by the way."

Kite Hill

Atop Kite Hill
By PAUL BERGER

IT'S early evening in Prospect Park, and three men from Barbados are relaxing on Kite Hill. Officially there's no such hill in the park, but regulars know the place, a hillock in the Long Meadow where on weekday evenings and weekends men from the neighborhood fly homemade kites.

On this mild August evening, the three men, who all live in Brooklyn, are the only kite flyers on the hill. Cheston Straker, 65, is the oldest - the professor, 39-year-old Andy Crichlow calls him - and he has many stories about his kite-flying days.

Mr. Straker has flown handmade kites in the park for almost 30 years. He has seen airplanes snap strings, and police officers called in because the kites have been spotted on radar. He has seen heady days when his kite soared more than 1,000 feet, and he has ducked under the trees atop Kite Hill to seek shelter from summer storms.

This day, Mr. Straker tugs the string to the left and right of his body and makes his kite dance in a figure eight more than 200 feet above the meadow. He lets the reel run through his fingers for another 50 feet, then tugs and it dances again.

"I've seen people come and go in this park," he says. "Kids grow up and now they are grown men. But they still come around and shout me and say hello."

On suffering

A Fellowship of Suffering, Ever Expanding
By ALAN FEUER

THEY say that misery loves company, but it's not exactly true. Misery loves the right sort of company.

You had to look a little Thursday afternoon to find that truth, but it was there, like a sharp thorn in the rosy prayers and speeches on behalf of the victims of Hurricane Katrina, offered up by men and women who had lost someone on 9/11. A baker's dozen of them - stoic mothers, strident sisters and a sad, insomniac uncle - had come out for a while to stand by the bays of Ladder Company 10 on Liberty Street in Lower Manhattan to give their thoughts and hearts to those whose lives the storm had washed away.

"It's not an exclusive club, the suffering club," said William Healey, a tall, white-haired man with a look of lasting grief, whose niece, Renee Newell, a 37-year-old American Airlines employee, died when the towers were attacked. "We feel their pain."

With all due respect, Mr. Healey may be only half right. The club that he belongs to is an exclusive club. There is suffering, and there is suffering. There is private pain, and then there is the sort of pain that suddenly goes public, that is broadcast to the nation. Perhaps only members of that club can truly feel each other's pain.

It's a select group. The 9/11 families belong to it, of course, as do those who lost a loved one in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Now the victims of Katrina, too, belong.

That's why Diane Horning came from Scotch Plains, N.J., to stand outside that firehouse across the street from a hole in the ground. Ms. Horning lost her son, Matthew, 26, in 2 World Trade Center on 9/11. She wanted to let the good folks of New Orleans know that she understands.

"My heart is broken in two for those people," Ms. Horning said in a way that the rest of us outside the club might never understand. She has been through the shock, the grief, the numbness and then the queasy sense that after the world got hold of it, her pain was not her own.

"You're often asked to wear a mask," she said of those whose suffering becomes a national event. Sometimes it's the mask of bravery. Sometimes it's a mask of stoicism. Sometimes it's just a steely smile.

"I wouldn't presume to give them advice," Ms. Horning said. "But if I did, it would only be to be authentic. Be themselves."

By her own admission, people who have suffered publicly are different from you and me, tougher to handle. Their grief has become a symbol of survival and resolve. They are forced by caring strangers to remember, but what they often want is to forget.

"How do you get over something if you're constantly barraged by images of what you're trying to escape?" Ms. Horning's husband, Kurt, asked.

After all, the public often says: Don't forget. Don't forget the towers falling down. Don't forget the levees breaking open. But the person who went through those things will often say: Don't make me go through it again. Don't remind me anymore.

The vigil on Liberty Street was organized by the Rev. Bill Minson, who has counseled 9/11 families for the last four years. Before that, he worked with residents of Oklahoma City.

THIS day, he told a story. Several months ago, the Oklahomans came to town for a joint memorial service with the 9/11 families. When the Oklahomans were announced, he said, you could sense the silent recognition in the crowd: "It was like people were finally saying, 'Somebody here really understands.' "

New Orleans, like New York, will rise again, the reverend said. A sister told the cameras that her firefighter brother died in the towers that day in the service of his country. A father told about the blood drive he had started in memory of his son. A mother told the people of New Orleans that the people of New York were indebted to them. "New York will always stand behind its fellow Americans," she said, "because New York will not forget what its fellow Americans did for us."

New York will not forget. History lives most vividly, after all, in the minds and memories of those who suffered through it. It will, no doubt, be the same in New Orleans and in Biloxi, Miss., and up and down the Gulf Coast.

A personal article on a home

Taking Root in Memories
By NINA BERNSTEIN

BETWEEN the ages of 6 and 11, I played in an enchanted place guarded by a giant copper beech tree. Its branches rose over the eaves of a rambling house full of hidden corners. Its leaves rustled above a backyard that still slopes and meanders in my memory, past a wisteria-shaded arbor to a tangle of raspberry bushes, beyond a glittering goldfish pond to a dark sweep of hemlocks.

For more than four decades, I did not go back to see what remained of this improbable childhood Eden, in Whitestone, Queens, an unfashionable section of New York's most prosaic borough. Even in the 1950's, our old brown-shingled corner house set on half an acre of land was an oddity amid the neighborhood's row housing and tidy lawns. When my family sold it and left for a Manhattan apartment in 1960, part of the land went to a developer.

I assumed that the place had ceased to exist outside my imagination. But there it took root and eventually became the setting for "Magic by the Book," a fantasy adventure for children. Last spring, when I was invited to give a reading at the Whitestone branch of the Queens Borough Public Library, I steeled myself for a pilgrimage to whatever was left of my childhood home.

"Magic in Queens?" a New Jersey friend had jeered. Like many people, he envisioned the borough as an unmagical clutter of ugly on-ramps, where the bigotry of television's Archie Bunker mixed with an immigrant hubbub of 150 different tongues. Others wondered aloud why a family named Bernstein had chosen to buy a house in what was then a mainly Irish and Italian neighborhood.

We arrived there by a circuitous route, after four years of living abroad, at a point when home had almost become an exotic concept to us. House hunting in 1955 with four young children and one salary, my parents nearly despaired. Then they met a doctor's widow determined to save the old-fashioned place in Whitestone where she had raised her own children. Just to keep the property intact a few years longer, she sold it to us for $20,000, a bargain even then.

In 2005, it seemed doubtful that the house was still standing. With real estate prices soaring, such places were being bought to be demolished. My parents had driven by in the spring of 2004 and spotted a browning Christmas wreath on the front door. The place looked neglected, they said, as though just waiting for the wrecker's ball.

But they were wrong. An Internet search turned up the owner, a professional photographer named Harry Zaverdas. In an e-mail exchange he reassured me. Yes, developers kept calling, and the property he bought 10 years ago for $250,000 was now valued at more than $1 million. Yes, major repairs were needed, and his do-it-yourself restoration was progressing slowly. But he had no intention of selling.

"When I first bought the house, on July 14th, 1995, I had this passionate desire to find out everyone who owned it and even more, who had it built," Mr. Zaverdas wrote. From property records and old newspapers, he learned that it was the first house on the block, built in 1908 for a woman named Harriet Brewer. One clipping referred to it as Mrs. H. C. Brewer's $10,000 house.

Ever since F. Scott Fitzgerald's harrowing evocation of "the valley of ashes" - the Corona garbage dumps - in "The Great Gatsby," the image of Queens has struggled under a cloud of cinders and car exhaust. But Whitestone was settled before the Revolutionary War, and when the house was built, the borough was still dominated by rolling farmland and ferry landings, still kin to Fitzgerald's "fresh, green breast of the new world."

Transformation, however, was less than two years away. In 1909, the Queensboro Bridge opened, ending the county's isolation. In 1910, the railroad inaugurated the Penn Tunnels under the East River, and virtually all of Queens came within Manhattan's commuting zone.

During my return visit last spring, on the drive from downtown Flushing to the Whitestone library, auto body shops and highway underpasses deepened my misgivings. The library itself was unrecognizable, and no wonder: the foundation stone said 1970. But Mr. Zaverdas had come to the reading and was ready to lead me back in time.

THE long walk from the library had been a hallmark of childhood summers. My sister and I used a picnic basket to carry back our haul, including one book picked at random to give magic a chance. At home, the green canvas hammock waited under the copper beech tree.

Suddenly, there it was: the beech tree, still leafless but even taller than in memory. Through a tangle of branches was the outline of a house I would have known anywhere.

Mr. Zaverdas had warned me to expect disarray. "When I purchased the home, it was decomposing," one of his e-mail messages explained, alluding to the divorce of previous owners that led to 20 years of neglect. "I still have not done anything major, but for the first three months, I scraped practically all the white peeling trim on the windows and painted so it looked alive again."

At the front door I paused, remembering my last time inside.

The movers had come and gone. It was autumn and turning chilly. But my sister and I prevailed in our plea to stay one more night, just the two of us. We made a last trip to the library, and heated cocoa on a basement burner. When it was too dark to read, we crept upstairs through shadowy, denuded rooms, to the lone remaining bed. The next morning our departure felt like an abandonment.

Now, stepping over the threshold, I was overwhelmed by sheer profusion. Like some ancient attic, the house brimmed with objects awaiting rediscovery or repair - a dismantled headboard in a hallway, invoices spread in neat heaps over an antique couch, fake spider webs left from Halloween. Even the walls were layered, some on the upper floors gutted to the struts, others a palimpsest of flaked and faded paint whispering of lives gone by.

Dizzy with the past, I was almost glad when the tour led out the back door, though I had been dreading most what I would find there. In memory, the garden still offered magic potions and secret passages to four children playing through a long blue twilight. In reality, of course, other houses had long since buried our backyard paradise.

Yet an aura of enchantment still hung over the remaining lot. Small evergreens stood in concentric circles. A wooden swing stirred in the wind. A mirror glittered unexpectedly from the trunk of a copper beech tree so huge that experts estimated its age at 125 years; Mr. Zaverdas, as his personal 9/11 memorial, gave away its sturdy saplings.

My tree, I realized, had been growing here before the railroad's reach, before bridge and boulevard, before forest was felled to build the house. In Queens, against all odds, it was growing still.

On overseas views of the hurricane

The View From Abroad
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN

Berlin

THEY were perhaps a bit slow, but the expressions of sympathy and offers of aid in the wake of Hurricane Katrina did materialize in Europe through the week.

Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany declared, "'Our American friends should know that we are standing by them." The French prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, offered to send supplies, two airplanes, 35 members of civil security rescue teams, and other equipment and personnel.

Still, Europe's response so far to the calamity of Katrina has been complicated, even ambivalent. There was plenty of sympathy and willingness to help, but there was also, as with Mr. de Villepin's offer, a rather formulaic quality and an absence of any powerful, spontaneous surge of empathy and affection for the afflicted nation.

Why?

It is hard to measure this, but judging from the commentary and the blogs, the collective European response to the victims of the tsunami or the famine in Niger, to the killings in Darfur or the deaths of Shiite pilgrims in Baghdad seems to have been more immediate and deeply felt than for the victims of Katrina. And one reason for this relative coolness may be that these other disasters took place in poor, troubled nations, not in the most powerful and richest country on earth.

In fact, the spectacle of the hurricane causing a disaster of third-world proportions in the United States seems to have provoked a sort of dismay among Europeans, mingling with the sorrow. As a reporter on BBC Television argued on Friday, not able to keep the anger from his voice, the looting, the armed gangs, the gunplay and, especially, the arrogance, in his view, that the mostly white police displayed toward mostly black residents represented "the dark underbelly of life in this country." There was something shameful, he said, about the way a natural disaster has produced behavior that, for example, the tsunami didn't produce in the third-world countries it hit. And it is painful to be a witness to somebody else's shame.

"Why should hundreds die, mostly African-Americans, in a predicted disaster in the richest nation on earth" was one expression of a widespread feeling in Europe, this one appearing Friday in a letter in the British newspaper The Guardian.

There were many comments to the effect that earlier predictions of the disaster did not lead public officials to make sure the levees would withstand any possible onslaught, and there was the unspoken opinion that such would not have been the case, say, with the dikes of the Netherlands, or in any of the rich European countries.

"These are incredible scenes from the richest and the biggest country in the world," Jean-Pierre Pernaud, the anchorman on one of the main midday French news programs, said on Friday. A program on the competing channel ran an interview with a specialist on the United States, Nicole Bacharan, who said, "These images reveal to the world the reality in the Southern states: the poverty of 37 million Americans."

A few environmentalists in Europe seized on the situation to express one of their greatest irritations: the unwillingness of the Bush administration to sign the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. Jürgen Trittin, minister of the environment in Germany, was the most prominent among these, though others in Europe echoed this sentiment.

"The American president has closed his eyes to the economic and human damage that natural catastrophes such as Katrina - in other words, disasters caused by a lack of climate protection measures - can visit on his country," Mr. Trittin said.

But Mr. Trittin's comment, which made headlines in Germany, provoked as much outrage as approval. "Instead of standing by the Americans as they try to come to grips with the hurricane catastrophe, our environment minister Trittin shows the world the face of the ugly German," the mass circulation Bild Zeitung wrote Friday. A British commentator, Gerard Baker, called comments like those of Mr. Trittin and a few others examples of "intellectual looting." It was, he said, "the predictable exploitation of tragedy for political purposes."

Still, Mr. Baker also went on to make the point that the real problem was the inherent inequality of suffering. "The tragedy has been visited disproportionately, indeed almost exclusively, on the city's African-Americans," he wrote.

There is no doubt most Europeans feel sorrow over the scenes of devastation they see on television, and many will no doubt contribute to funds set up to help the victims. At the same time, however, the particular circumstances of New Orleans and Biloxi, Miss., have tended to confirm the worst image of America that prevails in Europe, the vision of a country of staggering inequalities, indifference to the general welfare (especially during the Bush administration), and lacking in what Europeans call "solidarity."

As that BBC reporter put it, there were no scenes of armed gangs of looters in gun battles with the police in Sri Lanka after the tsunami.

That things have gone so badly so quickly after the storm in New Orleans has produced, beyond sympathy, feelings in Europe of disappointment, distress and even fear that a major city in the world's superpower could have fallen into something that looks, from this side of the Atlantic, like anarchy.

On the astrodome

As they drove into Houston on Interstate 10 Thursday morning, evacuees from the New Orleans Superdome saw a "Welcome" sign. Local residents had hung bedsheets over the edge of overpasses and erected signs on trucks with messages like, "Welcome New Orleans, Our House Is Your House."

"They were playing Lil' Wayne [a popular New Orleans hip-hop artist] on the radio when we drove into town," says Augustus Warren Williams, 45. "They are treating us better than our own people."

For the desperate, dirty, overwhelmed people arriving at Houston's Astrodome, which took in 11,000 evacuees until authorities closed the door Thursday night, the contrast with the situation at the Superdome is stunning. They describe a nightmarish scene: tens of thousands of people packed into a stadium surrounded by overflowing sewage, piles of rotting garbage and corpses, in delirium-inducing heat, without adequate food or water. Hostilities rose and violence erupted. Law enforcement was grossly inadequate. Evacuees told stories, some of which have been confirmed by authorities, of rapes, fighting and a suicide. Their relief at having arrived at a place with food, water, sanitary facilities and proper security was palpable.

After initially planning to shelter 23,000 evacuees, authorities decided Thursday night that the Astrodome could only accommodate 11,000. Buses were rerouted to surrounding towns like Huntsville, with San Antonio and Dallas each preparing to receive 25,000 people. So far, families that were split up before evacuation have no way of contacting each other.

None of the volunteers available for comment could provide any idea of how long the refugees will be housed in the Astrodome or in Houston at large. Although the Houston school system has taken on thousands of displaced kids, they have no idea how long this situation will last. No officials would comment on the subject of resettlement, leaving the long-term fate of Hurricane Katrina's refugees uncertain.

As we approach the designated volunteer and press entranceway to the Astrodome, the blast of cool air conditioning is a relief from the scorching Texas sun. Inside the dome, cots are organized in rows according to occupants' last names, so that family members can better find one another if they have been separated in transit. At the Superdome, evacuees were forbidden to leave because of flooding. At the Astrodome, everyone is given a pink wristband upon arrival so that they can come and go as they please.

A bewildering array of volunteers move among the cots, including medical technicians, psychologists and local volunteers registering names and handing out donated food and water.

The contrast between this scene and the one at the Superdome is not lost on evacuees. "It was inhuman and disgusting in the Superdome," says Nathaniel Brooks, 71. "They had us cooped up in there and some of the younger boys were going crazy. Fighting, hurting each other, arguing. I couldn't wait to leave."

The evacuees, most of them poor and black, blast officials for the failed relief effort. "The mayor couldn't stop the rain, but I know he could have done a lot more to help his people," says Brooks.

Laverda Suber, 50, evacuated New Orleans, but her brother and nieces decided to stay, and ended up trapped in the Superdome's catacombs. "My family was calling me from the Superdome, and they couldn't find where the rations were being distributed," says Suber. "They went hungry and were dehydrated."

Hurricane Katrina stripped the Superdome of its Teflon cover, caused leaking, and left the shelter without power.

Evacuees say New Orleans and federal officials failed to provide them with adequate services. They say they were grossly understaffed. "Five or six buses showed up at the Superdome and there was no one to tell anyone what to do -- I got crushed," says James Matthews, 61, who is handicapped and suffered a sprained wrist in the stampede. "This is 99 percent better."

For their part, furious local and state officials are demanding answers from federal agencies about the abysmal federal response to the catastrophe, which left thousands trapped in a lawless city for days without food, water or medical help. The mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, was actually reduced to sending out "a desperate SOS" for help.

As the city became aware of the storm's approach, Nagin repeatedly referred to the Superdome as a shelter of "last resort," emphasizing evacuation as the only safe choice for New Orleanians. However, it was widely known that New Orleans could suffer catastrophic damage in a storm of Katrina's magnitude, and it was also widely known that tens of thousands of people lacked the means to evacuate. The question in many people's minds in the Astrodome today is, Why weren't better evacuation and shelter contingency plans in place?

At the Astrodome, plates of sausage, eggs and tortillas are being distributed. A crush of people surrounds a station at which Red Cross volunteers are passing out underwear, stockings, socks, T-shirts, diapers and toiletries. The bleachers are festooned with wet clothing set out to dry in the neon lights. The showers are supplied with soap, and the bathrooms are equipped with industrial-sized pumps of hand sanitizer. On one set of seats hangs a sign announcing free children's events, including a trip to the Houston Zoo.

Despite the appearance of centralized management behind this rescue operation, the relief efforts taking place at the Astrodome are entirely ad hoc. "I was at work this morning minding my own business when I got a mass e-mail from my company saying that we are in great need of volunteers at the Astrodome," says Bryce Giescer, in his mid-50s. "I just showed up, found a Red Cross person and said, 'Point me and push,' and they did." Giescer is an employee of the Reliant Energy Co., which provides most of the electricity for the Houston area. Other companies, including Continental, Shell Oil and BP, are providing a staff of volunteers.

Across the 610 expressway from the Astrodome is Astro World, an amusement park that has offered free entry to anyone staying at the Astrodome. Houston's Third Ward Bike Shop is donating 50 bicycles to evacuees, and kids can ride around the vast and empty parking lot that surrounds the stadium.

Despite the vastly improved conditions at the Astrodome, there are some problems. Several people have been arrested for fighting over cots, and 30 guns were confiscated. Several evacuees have been seen repacking suitcases full of looted merchandise. In the bathrooms, one emergency medical official who declined to be named ordered some New Orleanians to cease using drugs in the stalls. The days spent in the Superdome have left people in varying states of trauma.

The dramatic failure of authorities to deal with the New Orleans catastrophe has caused darker thoughts to surface among former residents. "In some places, the streets are totally dry," says Nathaniel Brooks. "And in other places you can't see the tops of the houses. I don't know how to account for this. But it seems like something's not right."

While kids appear to be content coloring in donated coloring books and playing on the rolled-up bolts of Astro-Turf, many adults lie in their cots staring blankly into the distance. As we approach people, many are indifferent about speaking to us. They have gone through enough already and don't seem to feel that talking to the media will do anything to improve their situation. But traces of the old New Orleanian civility remain. People who do feel able to talk with us shake our hands and tell us to be safe and to take care of ourselves.

Some refugees from Katrina feel betrayed by their city to the point that they are ambivalent about returning. "I've put in my application at the Holiday Inn down the street," says Johnraver Prince, 19. "New Orleans is not doing what they can for us. I'm thinking to stay." Other evacuees echoed these sentiments. Some say their lives in New Orleans have been completely destroyed.

On Bush, and criticism

For the third time since George W. Bush became president, Americans are paying a catastrophic price for bad government. As the costs are tallied once more in death and dollars, we are being told that the wise and patriotic thing to do is shut up -- as if good citizens are obliged to remain silent about unwise and incompetent leadership.

Honest political debate over how and why we lost the great city of New Orleans, according to the latest dictates from the right, means "an excess of recrimination," "finger-pointing" and "villain hunting." Such a "vulgar" exercise risks overshadowing our normal national unity and generosity in confronting disaster with "divisiveness" and "partisanship." We are piously advised instead to do good and find common ground, to "be humble, compassionate and helpful." Thus speak the sages of the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal.

In short, we must simply write checks to the Red Cross and choke off any critical impulse.

Following such worthless advice would require us all to keep quiet even while the president of the United States again speaks falsely about matters of the utmost importance to the nation.

"I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees," he told Diane Sawyer on ABC's "Good Morning America."

That statement was wholly untrue, as Sidney Blumenthal noted on Wednesday in Salon -- and as the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., the former chief of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency all tried to warn in recent years. Cutbacks in funding for flood control and emergency preparedness by the Bush administration and the Republican Congress over the past several years probably made a terrible event much worse.

The president's defenders can tolerate no discussion of those realities, however, because they have no plausible answers. Instead they urge us all to keep quiet or be accused of undermining America.

Does this all sound strangely familiar, like a nightmarish flashback?

A repetitive pattern is emerging whenever a terrible event occurs that is due at least partly to governmental incompetence. The president and other high officials offer deceptive utterances to excuse themselves. And reinforcing their self-serving statements is a chorus of admonishments from the right against any dissent or criticism.

After 9/11, the White House falsely claimed that there had been no warnings and that the Bush administration had been preparing for an attack by al-Qaida since its earliest days in office. Anyone who said otherwise -- or who merely wanted to investigate the underlying weaknesses that had enabled the attackers -- was a "partisan" seeking to "undermine the war on terror."

There was also, we should recall, much chatter back in those dark times about the wonderful unity and generosity of the nation. That is true now and was true then, as far as it went. Unfortunately, the "united we stand" spirit didn't survive the moment when, several weeks after the 9/11 attacks, Bush advisor Karl Rove boasted to his fellow Republicans about his plan to use the war on terror to win the 2002 midterm elections.

The pattern continued with the invasion of Iraq, which has become a disastrous misadventure owing to the poor planning, inept management and mendacious propaganda of the White House. To examine the errors and lies that have landed our troops in quicksand and drained away hundreds of billions of dollars is to provide aid and comfort to America's enemies -- or so we have been warned, especially since the president's popularity ratings have been in free fall.

And now we are told that only bad people dare to criticize their bad government.

So we are not to mention the downgrading of the Federal Emergency Management Agency from a Cabinet-level agency to a neglected sideline of the Department of Homeland Security. We must not say that FEMA was turned away from its mission when the president replaced its superb director, James Lee Witt, with political cronies who knew nothing about disaster planning. We cannot talk about the consistent underfunding of the Army Corps of Engineers, whose efforts to rebuild the Louisiana levees practically halted because of budget cuts last year. Above all, we must never, ever ask whether global warming might be making the annual perils of tropical weather systems much, much worse.

None of this is to say that the hurricane is "Bush's fault," which would obviously be unfair. But as with 9/11 and Iraq, the president and his administration deserve to be held accountable for poor judgment, damaging decisions and false statements.

Neither bullying bluster nor banal pieties can deter candid debate about federal emergency planning and funding, the underlying causes of harsher hurricanes over the past few decades, and the crippling domestic costs of an expensive, unnecessary foreign war. The right's capacity to intimidate has been much diminished by the proven lies and failures of this administration.

We are likely to face still more fearsome challenges, from natural disasters and human enemies, in the months and years to come. The governing style and habitual dishonesty of the Bush Republicans represent a severe danger to our future well-being. Nobody should be afraid to say so.

Finally, an article related to the recent events in Gaza

When one settler family was forcibly removed from their home in Kerem Atzmona in the Gaza Strip last week, the patriarch put a sign on the door: Judenrein. His wife instructed their children to walk with their hands raised above their heads. She had sewn orange stars on their lapels. Their dramatic and scripted exit was clearly meant to evoke the famous 1943 photograph of the little boy surrendering to the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto. Some of the members of the Israeli army who were supervising their removal wept. Had I been there, in uniform, I'm not sure I would have been able to refrain from hauling the parents of those children out of the house by their hair, and giving them a klop on the ass for good measure.

The treatment the settlers received from those Jewish soldiers was so thoughtful, so judicious, so tender. The officers in command of the evacuation spent hours negotiating with the settlers, listening to their ravings, before gently escorting them away. And yet, over and over again we heard the settlers analogizing their suffering to the massacre of millions during the Holocaust. Dikla Cohen of the settlement Neve Dekalim said, "I feel that today was a pogrom."

Are these people so blinded by their fanaticism that they believe that the trauma of relocation can be compared to the horrors of Auschwitz and Babi Yar? Are they so benighted that they believe that being given a quarter of a million dollars in compensation for your house is akin to watching a Nazi soldier spear your newborn child on the tip of his bayonet?

I watched the Gaza settlers with rage in my heart, but I watched the soldiers managing their evacuation with only admiration. This was the Israeli army of my childhood, the one for whom my oldest brother nearly lost his life in the Yom Kippur War. I had long since considered that army a myth, one born of my father's romantic storytelling. When I was a girl I'd listen to him recount battle stories from the War of Independence in 1948, when he and his compatriots fought with insufficient weapons and ragged uniforms, but with more than enough will to forge a country. But the myth of that army had faded for me, lost in the gloom of the Lebanon War and the bitter misery of the intifada.

I was born in Israel, to Canadian parents. My father immigrated in 1948, part of a wave of young men and women who came as pioneers, to fight for a Jewish homeland. Their motive was in large part a reaction to the Holocaust, and their slogan was "Never Again." We moved back to North America in 1967, when I was 2 years old, but my father was never happy here. He pined for Israel, and he instilled in me both a sense of longing for a place I barely remembered, and the conviction that no Jew could call anywhere else home.

When I was younger I was a good soldier in my father's army of memory. I retained my Israeli accent, took up Israeli folk dancing, marched in the Israeli Independence Day parade in New York wearing blue and white. I was a member of a Zionist Socialist youth group, and spent my summers at its camp, wearing ugly leather sandals and singing songs about the scent of eucalyptus along the banks of the Galilee.

The person I was back then would surely have had a less extreme reaction to the evacuation of the Gaza settlements. I never supported the settlements; my own family of former kibbutzniks was far too well ensconced in Israel's left wing to think of the West Bank and Gaza as anything other than occupied territories. Still, I probably would have felt pity for the settlers, and some part of me might even have understood their fanaticism as a starker version of my own Zionism. When I was still under the sway of my father's opinion, I believed passionately in the necessity and inevitability of a Jewish state. Now, however, my sense of tragedy outweighs my hopefulness, and while I still tell my children stories of riding horses through the Jordan River, I can't help fearing that the Zionist enterprise will one day be seen to have done the Jewish people more harm than good. Our tenacious hold on this strip of homeland has become the scapegoat for the world's terrorism and this wouldn't be the case if we remained a people of the diaspora. My father is sure that Israel keeps the Holocaust from happening again. I worry that it might hasten its recurrence.

Last Tuesday, when the pullout from Gaza was more or less complete, I was in the Salt Lake City airport, musing about that couple in Kerem Atzmona and their manipulation of their children's images. Gaza was full of protesting kids, young Jews from the West Bank who had smuggled themselves in to make a stand against their oppressors. And who were those oppressors? Other young Jews, in khaki instead of the modest hippie mufti preferred by the protesters.

I was thinking about the way the settlers indoctrinated their children in this permanent political firestorm, and how it wasn't so different from the way my own father had indoctrinated me into Zionism. Just as these thoughts were going through my mind, I found out that because of President Bush's impromptu visit to the Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention, the Salt Lake City airport would be shut down for four hours. The resulting delays meant that my husband, my kids and I were stuck overnight in an Airport Inn. I cursed Bush and his cowardice, raving that if he'd just met with Cindy Sheehan for 15 goddamn minutes he wouldn't have had to schlep all the way to Salt Lake City to prove that he cares about the thousands of American soldiers who have died in Iraq, and we and the rest of vacationing America could have made it home without incident.

In the middle of my selfish, only half-serious tirade, I glanced over at my kids. They were nodding along, their faces twisted in rage. They hate George Bush, loathe him with a passion that would make Michael Moore proud. When my then 3-year-old was learning about Purim last year she very seriously announced, "There are two bad men in the world, Haman and George Bush." (The next month she added King Pharaoh and Donald Rumsfeld to her panoply of evil.) Looking at my children, all of whom spent last fall decked out like miniature John Kerry advance men, I realized that there is a fine line between education and indoctrination. And just like the Gaza and West Bank settlers, just like my father, I have long since leapt across that line.

It is, obviously, a matter of degree. The Gaza family's indoctrination is much more intense than the casual Bush-bashing that goes on in my house. But then, right now the sanctity of my home isn't directly at stake. As angry as I am at those settlers, as disgusted by their use of their children as pawns, listening to my own kids parrot back their disgust for all things Republican, I realized that we are not so different after all. The settlers enlisted their children in the battle for Gaza because they are certain they are right. They feel their children deserve to learn the truth. My children have learned as many adamant truths at my knee. They have learned to blame George Bush and the Republican Party for everything from the war in Iraq to global warming to the vilification of their favorite television shows.

I have no idea what causes a child to rebel, to reject her parents' beliefs as I've come to reject my father's. I don't know why some become, like the teenagers who barricaded themselves behind concertina wire in the West Bank town of Homesh, even more fanatical soldiers in their parents' self-same army of ideology. Perhaps my children will one day pledge their loyalty to the Republican Party. Or perhaps they'll dismiss my liberalism as mild pap, and become anarchists. Either way may well be a reaction to my manipulation, my values. We are all the product of the indoctrination we received at the hands of our parents, even when we are repudiating that ideology. What is certain, however, is that like the Gaza settlers, like my father, like me, my children will do their best to indoctrinate the next generation with their particular dogma. And so it goes.