The following email is from a friend of Julie's currently living in Australia. Thought you guys might find it interesting.

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I'm having a tough time being on the other side of the world. The media here
(and people I know, even) are really excited to get some new reason to point out the States'
faults. As if we should have been able to control the weather-- or the Mississippi. As if
we have ever denied having poor people at all. Everything has been oversimplified. I feel
like I have engaged with issues of race and poverty for a long time and now I am turned into
the bad guy simply because I am white. The good guys, apparently, and according to
themselves, are the Australian media, who have been rescuing stranded Oz citizens.

"AMERICANS were yesterday waking up to the painful truth that hurricane Katrina had dramatically exposed the racial and economic fault lines that exist between blacks and whites in the world's richest and most powerful nation."

"It wasn't until Channel Nine reporter Robert Penfold arrived yesterday and
helped them get to a staging area and on a bus that they felt safe."

And best of all, the opinion page:

"That any American city could descend so quickly into anarchy will surely have
stunned many. That it exposed a social underclass so desperate just to survive that
looting became necessary must surely shame them."