UNIMAGINABLE: I'm writing at 8 am Friday morning. Here's the Plain Dealer's front page. New Orleans was flooded Tuesday morning, three full days ago. As far as I can tell from the news, the convention center, the hospitals, hotels -- not to mention the streets -- are still full of people with little or no food or water. The National Guard has still not arrived in massive numbers, though three hundred Guardsmen are said by the Governor to be coming with guns "locked and loaded". Many streets are controlled by armed gangs. Houston's Astrodome is already full of bussed-in refugees from the Superdome, but the Superdome is still full, too. People not in "shelters" have been wading in filthy, toxic water for three days. They're screaming for help. For the most part, help has not shown up... three days later.

Watching the coverage last night, my 23-year-old daughter said this was the weirdest thing she could remember seeing in her life. Yes, exactly.

In some ways New Orleans is (or was) very much like Cleveland: roughly the same size, slightly higher income and education numbers but still near the bottom, majority African-American. These are people like us.

So it might be worth trying to imagine our city, blown apart by a Category 5 storm, then inundated by three or four feet of Lake Erie water. Imagine that no stores have been open and no phones, bank machines, lights, TVs, buses have worked for three days. Imagine a hundred thousand of our poorest neighbors stuck in their damaged, unlit homes or wandering the flooded streets of Central, Hough, Kinsman, Broadway, Ohio City -- the infirm elderly, single mothers with little kids, unemployed families, not to mention withdrawing addicts and criminals with guns. Imagine that 25,000 people are stuck in Jacobs Field and Gund Arena, surrounded by floodwater and with little to eat or drink and no communication. Imagine that another 20,000 people are stuck in the Convention Center with absolutely no resources, with dead bodies shoved into corners, human waste everywhere, literally starving. Imagine Metrohealth and St. Vincent's full of hundreds of sick and dying patients, no power, almost no food, evacuation happening only as fast as other cities' hospital helicopters can manage. Imagine we have thousands of dead already and no idea who they are. Imagine that you can easily get shot dead -- by a gang or a policeman -- if you venture out to a store to take some food, or water, or shoes, or batteries, or something else you desperately need but can't buy because no one's there to sell it to you.

Imagine that we've been living (or dying) like this in Cleveland, Ohio, for three full days and help has not arrived.

What country are we in, again?

Maybe things will be better in New Orleans by this time tomorrow. Maybe by Monday this will all seem (to the rest of us) like a bad dream we once had. Maybe a week from now we'll be back to worrying about Coingate and Paris Hilton. (Incidentally, did you know that the U.S. Senate is taking up repeal of the inheritance tax next week? Can't lose sight of priorities.)

But please, let's try not to forget what we saw -- and the way we felt -- today.

Yes, call the Red Cross and give them money. But then call Senators Voinovich and Dewine and ask them why the hell the Federal government run by their party has allowed this unimaginable, deadly, disgraceful mess to continue for three days in "the greatest country in the world."