A superb and heart-wrenching documentary about Hurricane Katrina in 4 acts. Some of it included footage I'd seen before, like the people at the New Orleans Superdome, but Lee also interviewed lots of people for their stories and comments. You can't come away from watching this and believe anything except that the government failed, especially the 9th ward, and that the administration simply did not and does not care what happens to them.

I saw Cspan footage related to this the other night; rows and rows of trailers, and streets still lined with debris.

Several years ago, while in the car, I heard a report from NPR about the New Orleans levees, that talked about how vulnerable NO was, that NO sits in a fishbowl that would cause great devastation if the levees broke or something otherwise caused flooding-the NPR report also discussed how the natural wetlands at the shore were receding and creating an even more vulnerable position.

So, the government knew this. They knew they had built the levees shabbily. And this wasn't the first time that areas of NO were hit badly-an example of that was Hurricane Betsy previously-there was no reason that the levees should have taken FORTY YEARS to build, and not solidly, at that.

One of the points in the movie that I had never considered so fully was how families were scattered all over the country. Some compared it to the slave auctions a couple of centuries ago-that you had your children taken to one place, your parents to another, your aunts and uncles and cousins in yet another. I remember watching the reunions on the news at the time, but it didn't hit me as it did last night; not just how bad it was to break up families, especially those who were going through this trauma, but how heartless not to provide, for example, vouchers to help those people get back home after.

I don't have any faith in this country, at least under the present administration, that this type of thing would never happen again and all the photo-ops that Bush makes now don't mean warm spit in a bucket. Anyway, it's a must see.