'Refugees' in their land
The caller wasn't one of the distraught. He was one of the angry.
Joseph Feaster wanted to complain about a local television report he had seen on Hurricane Katrina. He said it had shown victims of the storm struggling to flee New Orleans. He had tried unsuccessfully to get through to the television station, and then to the mayor's hot line, and then he tried me.
It was one seemingly benign word, used to describe people leaving the city, that got him going. They were described as ''refugees."
''I have relatives in New Orleans, on my wife's side," he said. ''Don't compound that pain by calling my relatives 'refugees.' Don't call US citizens who are African-American, and get displaced, 'refugees.' "
Former New Orleans mayor Marc Morial made a similar point yesterday on NBC's ''Meet the Press." In the midst of pleading for more aid for the city, he paused to dispute its citizens' newly described status.
''These are not refugees. Let's stop calling them refugees. They are American citizens."
By Friday, I had been hearing and reading the same term for several days. At first, it struck me as ironic: Refugee, after all, isn't a term Americans normally apply to other Americans. Homeless, yes, even displaced, but who ever heard of an American refugee in America?
It became more striking as the images continued to fill the television screens and the newspapers: poor black people in New Orleans, massed at the Superdome, stranded outside the convention center, making their way on foot along railroad tracks, their lives carried in plastic bags.
More than one commentator made the point that it was a scene from the Third World, one no one had expected to see in America. Those observations and the word ''refugee" seemed to be of a piece.
A refugee, in the words of Webster's Collegiate Tenth Edition, is ''one that flees: esp: a person who flees to a foreign country or power to escape danger or persecution."
Those who have departed New Orleans are, in one sense, clearly refugees. But refugees are also foreign, which is what offended my caller, and which troubles me as well.
While the American public is responding to the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina with an outpouring of charity, the government response, for days on end, was woefully inadequate.
The Bush administration has been pounded for its slow response to the unfolding tragedy, and rightly so. In the comments of people exasperated by the slow response, one note kept getting sounded over and over. The people left in New Orleans are poor and black, and the government doesn't feel any urgency about helping them. It doesn't care.
That was the impression left by New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin, in his blistering comments about the government's inaction. Nagin may actually have gotten some movement, because by Friday troops and aid were pouring into the city.
It is the idea of storm victims as outsiders -- as others, as foreigners -- that is driving some people crazy. If those ''refugees" are not quite Americans, not quite our own, it becomes acceptable for the nation to do less than its best by them.
Even though President Bush termed the response to the storm unacceptable on Friday, it took him an awfully long time to get fed up.
By the weekend, the massive disorganization seemed to be giving way to a more focused response -- one that will apparently include the resettlement of some displaced residents to Camp Edwards on Cape Cod. Better a late response than none at all, perhaps.
It seems like a small matter, but it's worth remembering that these citizens are not fleeing a foreign power. What they've left are the twin scourges of a natural disaster and an unprepared government, their own and ours.
They are, in fact, us.
Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at walker@globe.com. 
