It has now been the better part of a week since the US has had to deal with Katrina and her destructive path. Florida was lucky and just grazed by the power that she was to have as making landfall in Louisiana and Mississippi. The scenes from the areas hit squarely by Katrina are heartbreaking, but I think you need to know, you are not seeing everything, and if you did, you may not be as upset.

I guess I have I have a unique view of the situation as I was one of those very near the epicenter of the 1994 Northridge Earthquake. I was one of those people living in a tent for months after the quake, and it was a bad time, but not as bad as the media made it out to be.

The media reported the looting and riots and made it seem that the devastation was over all of LA and that all of LA was a wasteland. This was all a matter of editing by the media to show only the most salacious bits to boost their ratings. And boost them it did.

We are seeing on the news the same “devastating scenes” over and over again out of thousands of hours of footage they (the media) have shoot since Katrina passed. We see only the most desperate, most mentally distraught, most salacious of scenes to keep the audience interested and outraged, all in an effort to boost ratings.

Don’t get me wrong, what happened is bad, in fact It is far worse than what happened in Northridge because of the water situation, but what I want to stress is that you are only seeing what the media is showing you and you may not be getting all the news that is fit to view. In fact, there are stories of people helping people in simple ways that are not making it to the news. Stories of neighbors sharing their water and whatever was left in the freezer after the electricity went out. There are stories of people camping out and coming together as a community to ride through the bad times of this disaster. You are only seeing the worst of it, not any of the people helping people stories that are happening right now. I know, I lived it.

Just as in Iran where the troops are a lot more welcome than the US population has been lead to believe, so we do not see the nice things happening here, but rather only the stories of human strife and suffering. Why, because it sells advertisements, and keeps you watching.