Source: Time

The more things change, the more they stay the same:

Like Katrina, the tragedy is found in the particular and often reflected in the horrors facing the most vulnerable. In November 2005, three months after Katrina blew though New Orleans, 82-year-old Marguerite Simon sat on her front porch on Egania Street in the Ninth Ward. Spread out on the bushes along the path to the front door of her small home was an American flag, drying in the sun. The tiny, small-boned woman wearing rubber boots and a paper mask, had smoothed out the crumpled, wet flag that had draped her late husband's coffin.

Three weeks after Ike swept across Galveston, 74-year-old Francis Sullivan — "I'll be 75 on the 17th if I make it!" — is on her front stoop and eyeing a small triangular wooden trophy case on her living room floor amid a stinking pile of family belongings. The box contains the flag that had draped her husband's casket six years ago. It is an ironic coincidence, a reporter's happenstance, brought about by a random turn down a neighborhood street that looks like so many others on the island — lifeless homes with leafless, saltwater-poisoned trees, battered fences hung with soggy towels, shattered windows, and front yards filled with piles of wet carpet, soaked clothes, moldy pots and pans, beach chairs and books, all water-laden, useless, even dangerous from soaking in the diseased stew, and hung about with the smell of decay. Perhaps 20,000 households share this circumstance, according to Galveston Mayor Lyda Ann Thomas.

This time it took only three weeks for the story to vanish from the news. Can anyone remember the last time cable news even mentioned Ike?