Charlie -- ccfinlay -- made a comment yesterday about how inconsequential anything in his blog would seem compared to what's happening down in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast. And he's echoed the efforts and reporting done by Amber -- mekkavandexter -- and others about the continuing crisis. What's noteworthy about the situation (and about the recent events in Iraq, where at least 1,000 people died in the bridge stampede, is that it illustrates how small the world's become in the past decade. I'd say it probably started back during Vietnam, when reports from the war aired on the news, illustrating how easily our hold on civilization can slip -- and how quickly we also rail against the encroaching darkness such a slip invites. We are all one family, whether you trace your lineage back to the proto-Eve or you point to the connections we make each day through the internet and the nightly news stations. It is virtually impossible to live in a vacuum today. Even if you feel nothing for the Katrina victims or the Iraqi dead, you're still touched by those situations -- look at gas prices.

My point is that one of the things I've wanted to do as a writer is touch other people. Charlie mentions how the hurricane's effects put a passage of his thesis in a different light. The interviewer at Fantasybookspot.com, during an interview with Sarah Monette -- aka Truepenny -- about her Ace hardcover fantasy Melusine, comments how the relationships between characters and their city "mold our future relationships and actions." I think this is an unconscious echo of how far we've come as a people to a global community. Six degrees of separation? Ha! A rule you don't want to break about computer network is that you don't want your computer to make more than three hops to another computer or to a server -- network speed degrades. I think we're seeing here in the real world the growth of our connectivity.