The incredible devastation of Hurricane Katrina shook many of us to our core. Perhaps equally disturbing was the painfully slow and inadequate response by local, state and federal governments. Television viewers who saw images of mothers without food to feed their babies for days, at the very places evacuees were instructed to go for safe shelter, could not help but ask if the response would have been bigger, better and faster had the population of the hard-hit New Orleans not been what it was: 70 percent black, many of them poor.

And many of us could not help but answer, sadly, shamefully: Yes.

The crisis has triggered some passionate dialogue here in the States and internationally about what truths Hurricane Katrina fleshed out for all the world to see. And in this 21st-century world, many of these conversations have been taking place among online discussion groups. Members of one such group, linked by their common roots as former staffers or contributors of the now-defunct Korea Times Weekly (1990-1993), exchanged a number of e-mails in the days following Katrina’s touchdown along the Gulf Coast — expressing the universal feelings of loss, anger, shame and that internal struggle with what is the best way to help their fellow Americans.

Will all Americans rally around the flag to help those displaced by Katrina

Some, as former writers for a newspaper that provided gutsy reporting of the 1992 L.A. Riots (our Sa-i-gu), also noted a kind of déjà vu as they followed the coverage of Katrina’s aftermath. The sights and sounds of this crisis — the looting, lawlessness, fires, scenes of adult men and women weeping, presence of National Guardsmen on city streets as if a war zone — took us back to the chaos and violence of 13 years ago.

They are two very different events — one being the nation’s first multiracial riots, completely “man-made” and triggered by the acquittal of police officers who beat a black motorist; the other being one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history, made even more tragic by the shoddy response of our government leaders. And by no means are these events equal in scale.

But, on a visceral level, our community could relate to feeling helpless and forgotten by the government, left to their own devices to save themselves during the fiery 1992 siege. People chastised Koreans for arming themselves to protect their livelihoods during the Riots. Yet look at what happened to the citizens in New Orleans who did as the government instructed — evacuate to the Convention Center and Superdome, if they were unable to leave the city altogether — but were left to suffer in their own feces, deprived of the basic necessities of life.

The African American flood victims did have “the ability to articulate in English what they’ve gone through,” as pointed out by Kay Hwangbo, a documentary filmmaker and former staff writer of the Korea Times Weekly (KTW). And had it not been for the news media shining a bright light on these flood victims’ desperate cries for help, who knows when, and how many deaths later, the powers-that-be would have sent in all the resources they had at their disposal to aid and evacuate victims?