Does this sound familiar?

Pack them up, ship them off, don't tell them where they are going, make it difficult for families to reconnect, sort of like a couple hundred years ago, except this time there are no overt chains. Yet.

MySA.com: "At least one volunteer at Camp Williams says the scattershot rescue will make reconnecting families tougher, and reinforces their feelings of helplessness, said Christine Hurst, a certified crisis counselor.

Hurst said one young evacuee on Saturday told a family member in Texas that she was en route to Houston only to wind up in Utah."

Great, just great. For those people watching it is easy to say they should be grateful to be alive, but now will come the emotional toll. How will people find each other? Is the government going to pay to reunite families? Somehow in this kindler, gentler, compassionately conservative country...I don't think so. How do you prove who you are? How do you prove someone is dead? I mean, it's not like their taxes went towards improving their qualtiy of life, why not just make it impossible to collect any life insurance in a timely manner? This way there is a ready made underclass that will have no choice but to live on farms and reservations. A good portion of them will be educated, but that can be overlooked and you won't have to worry about the next generation having any of those uppity airs. What school system can absorb an influx of destitute students? And if they can, will they want to? Once again, I doubt it.

The fight for life will now become the fight to live in a country where the current government has demonstrated a complete and criminal indifference to their wellbeing. In Lucifer's Hammer, in the first chapter after the comet hits, there is something to the effect "the lucky ones died immediately". This has the potential to get really nasty and divisive.

What happened to my country?

Update: I hate Starbuck's coffee, but they seem to be nice employers. I still see some potential for fraud on both sides. While private enterprise is stepping up, though how they are going to convice people to pay a mortgage on a house that isn't there with a job they don't have, the government is achingly slow.

While New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast were drowning in water, FEMA and other assorted governmental officials were drowning in political quicksand. They at least get to go home and kiss the wife and kick the dog.