A good neighbor

Here's a side to the Hurricane Katrina disaster ten years ago which every single American ought to know about, although too many don't.

As the ghastly spectacle unfolded -- the flooded city, the floating corpses, the displaced people pouring into Texas, the bungled Bush administration response -- the government of Mexico launched a huge relief operation consisting of Mexican army units delivering and distributing tons of food and supplies to destitute refugees near San Antonio, plus two Mexican navy ships sent to New Orleans to help with the clean-up operation.  Even in the richest country on Earth, it can happen that a disaster is so overwhelming that outside help is needed -- and our neighbor to the south, whose border is not far from where the displaced persons had mostly ended up, rose to the occasion.

Yes, that Mexico, the same country Donald Trump has lately been endlessly insulting and threatening in order to whip up the knuckle-draggers of the Republican base.

You can read about it here (found via The Moderate Voice and Fair and Unbalanced), in the words of a senior US diplomat stationed in Mexico City at the time.

This followed on the American assistance offered to Mexico after the great Mexico City earthquake of 1985, twenty years earlier.  After the squalid episodes of territorial aggression which marked the early period of US-Mexican relations, such cases of mutual aid in times of need have started to build a better relationship between our country and a rising power of growing importance to our economy.

Unless, of course, we allow the know-nothing followers of a demagogic fool to throw it all away and start a new cold war (and trade war) right within the North American continent.