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I don't mean to minimize the seriousness of what has happened to Louisiana and Mississippi (I used to live in West Alabama myself, so I feel some attachment to those regions), but I was taken aback when a local mayor (of Biloxi, I think) spoke of this event as "our tsunami," according to a CNN headline. Isn't that statement somewhat over the top and, in a way, arrogant? There is a qualitative difference, not just a quantitative difference, between an event that kills perhaps 200,000 people, and an event that kills perhaps 100 people.
Why is it that Americans so strongly insist that our suffering is as bad as everyone else's suffering? Maybe it comes from a sense of guilt, a realization that, in fact, we never suffer the way that most people in the world suffer.
Again, I am not saying this to downplay the seriousness of the situation itself, just to raise a question about how Americans deal with these situations, and comport themselves more generally.
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