If you are the sort of person (like me) who learns about the emotional tenor of events by reading novels (and of course you are; that's why you're my friend), then run, don't walk, to the library and get John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. For you non-Yanks out there, it's a fictional account of life in the American Dust Bowl in the 1920s, when significant numbers of people were displaced from their homes in the plains states and ended up settling in the very regions where Katrina victims are going now.

(And of course, after the Dust Bowl came the Depression. A sobering thought . . . )