A friend stopped by yesterday. He had spent a few days in an upstate New York town that had been hard-hit by the recent flooding. He helping a buddy whose house had been invaded by the Susquehanna River. They lost everything. My friend was still shaken up by everything he’d seen. He said it looked like what you saw on TV with Katrina. You’d drive down streets, and see that people had dragged all their waterlogged and bedraggled things from their mud-caked houses to the curb. It was a wasteland. Town after town like this. He couldn’t even get into his buddy’s town at first, because the police were only letting people who could prove they were residents through.

Said my friend, “So many of these towns were full of poor people to being with. Lots of unemployment there. That whole area has been depressed for a while. And now this. You can’t imagine what those people are suffering now. Entire towns just aren’t going to come back from this thing.”

I said to my friend that I don’t have TV, but I do get my news from newspapers, Internet, and the radio, and I had no idea that damage had been that severe. My friend says its a scandal that more people don’t know how bad things are in the flood zone in upstate New York. He kept saying how those poor people didn’t have a lot to begin with, and now that’s been taken away from them.