(originally posted on my other blog (ML) Well, I’m sitting in a Hotel Suite provide by my company. The reason… I’m a refugee from Hurricane Katrina. I lived with my wife in Long Beach, Mississippi; we lost our home and my car. The funny thing is we had just moved there so I could open and run a new restaurant. Long Beach is about 10 miles from Biloxi, known for gambling and 24 hours of drinking and sometimes driving. We had moved there in March, we loved our large home close to the Beach. We actually bragged about being across the street from the beach. (south of the railroad tracks.) They don’t talk much about Mississippi on the news anymore, the people there are handling the crisis much more efficiently than in New Orleans. They had power back up and running in only five days. They didn’t even do that for victims of Hurricane Andrew (I’m from Ft. Lauderdale.) In New Orleans they had massive flooding, On the Gulf coast of Mississippi, the entire gulf coast of Mississippi, there is complete loss of everything for two blocks north. A thirty ft wave struck and left nothing but foundation not even pipes are left sticking out of the ground. The media loves to focus on New Orleans, only because they can bring up a certain nasty word and blame everything on the president. Have you ever seen a president visit a disaster area as much as Bush has? Anyway I won’t get into politics. The point of this is to exclaim the sadness that no one has recognized or celebrated the recovery efforts made by Mississippi. I might have only lived there a short time, but I have shared an experience with the population and I feel a sense of pride from witnessing their resiliency.