Current mood:	snarky
Current music:	Dead Kennedys "this could be anywhere"

Katrina general retiring from the Army.

As Lt. Gen. Russel Honore gets ready to retire from the Army and hand over his command on Friday, he says he wants to spend the rest of his life creating a "culture of preparedness" to prevent another post-disaster disaster.

"There's an attitude everywhere else that people are smarter than they are in New Orleans and in Mississippi. They're not," the 60-year-old general said at his office at Fort Gillem, just outside Atlanta. "What happened in New Orleans could have happened anywhere on the Eastern Seaboard...A vast part of America still thinks, `That couldn't happen where I live.' And they are dead damn wrong."

Right now, I live about 40 miles outside of Chicago, and each week there have been anywhere from one to almost two dozen people in the tri-state area over the past six weeks that have died from tornadoes, ice storms, or snow-related accidents. And yet, there are people who think that they're safe just because they're nowhere close to a major body of water or place that gets earthquakes.

So the next time someone makes a crack about "well, they shouldn't be living in a disaster-prone area," please point them to the buffet line at Dick's all-you-can-eat.