Give as much as you can, as quickly as you can, to organizations that can deploy help quickly. I recommend the Salvation Army. Click here to be directed to their donation server #5. (I figure it's less busy than servers 1 through 4.) If it's busy, keep clicking. Or call 1-800-SAL-ARMY, and get ready to hit redial.
When you're done donating, if you feel like it, read the rest of this post.
This country and its government have no shortage of skills when it comes to the logistics of deploying personnel and matériel to take on adverse, emergent, violent situations. We've done so recently in Afghanistan and Iraq; we even did so in Iran after the earthquake there. That we can't, or won't, do so on our own shores is a poignant, staggering demonstration of our double standards and skewed priorities.
Rescue and recovery in the Gulf Coast states is concretely in our national interest. The President should respond to the emergency there with at least as much resolve and passion as he has to situations where arguments of national security have been more abstract.
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, in his interview with WWL radio last night, exhibited appropriate outrage and acrimony. He and his city's most needy people have been so far treated by the Federal government as expendable. We can all see news footage of babies without food and water, of dead bodies sitting curbside, of people appealing, desperately and in vain, for help. Why the full force of this country's resources and generosity have not been brought to bear to help these people simply defies explanation. If Nagin is politically targeted by anybody for speaking his mind, it will compound the already negligent, disgraceful response to this tragedy.
When this is all over, people need to hold their elected representatives (all of them) to task for this. This can't happen again. Not like this.