Hung out to dry: with the plight of Katrina's victims broadcast on every TV station, America's dirty laundry--that the richest nation has millions of impoverished citizens--was aired for all the world to see.

AUDIENCES OF STEVEN SPIELBERG'S SUMMER BLOCKBUSTER, War of the Worlds, saw life imitating art in September as a helpless nation watched television images of millions of homeless and devastated Americans caught in the wake of monstrous forces that made mincemeat out of their homes and towns--and of the government forces assigned to protect and rescue them.

Spielberg had told interviewers he wanted to make a film about an "American refugee experience," giving those of us living in the world's last superpower a taste of the terror and powerlessness that is the daily bread of the world's nearly 40 million refugees, displaced, and stateless persons.

The director of E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and A.I. has long been fascinated with aliens and outsiders and the ways we manufacture and (mis)treat them. His films Schindler's List and The Terminal tracked the savage and venal ways "civilized" people make outcasts and refugees of our neighbors. So it's not surprising Spielberg remade H. G. Wells' classic. In War of the Worlds anti-imperialist Wells shows his British audience what it's like to be on the wrong end of colonialism's wrecking ball, and Spielberg's film raises the specter of an America overflowing with refugees.

By Labor Day, however, no one had to look to movies or news reports from the edges of the empire to find scenes of devastation. Images coming into our living rooms from the Gulf Coast resembled the carnage and devastation of the Gulf Wars and their ongoing wake. Millions of dislocated, frightened, and increasingly angry people scavenged for food, clothing, shelter, and a way out of town. Overcrowded and overwhelmed emergency shelters, bread lines, hospitals, and morgues struggled to do too little too late for those who expected a quicker response. And an American city without power, plumbing, police, or protection looked more like Baghdad than neighboring Baton Rouge.

The images of Katrina's wake and FEMA's folly didn't remind media and their American and global audiences of War of the Worlds but of refugee camps and failed states throughout the Third World. Story after story made the connection between New Orleans' collapse and abandonment and the familiar and distant plight of the world's refugees. Television images of armed troops (just back from Iraq) trying to control dirty, frightened, and angry crowds of locals only reinforced the image. The Third World had broken out in America's Gulf Coast and threatened to transform the region into the world's largest refugee camp (with a proposed FEMA trailer park covering hundreds of thousands of acres).

NOT SURPRISINGLY MANY PEOPLE TOOK EXCEPTION TO media references to Gulf Coast refugees, finding the term offensive and derogatory. The United Nations defines refugee as someone who has crossed an international border to find sanctuary, and most Americans think of refugees as foreigners who have come in search of aid. In the popular lexicon, then, refugee means a foreigner who has coming begging for our hard-earned tax dollars. No wonder so many of the homeless survivors and evacuees of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast rejected such an odious brand.

These folks were not "refugees" in search of charity. They were American citizens who had a right to demand their government assist them in this national emergency. And more than a few worried that if the rest of America began to think of them as refugees then they might be treated as such.

Most politicians and reporters quickly retreated from the "refugee" moniker, referring to the homeless as "displaced citizens" or "evacuees." In part this shift expressed sensitivity to the feelings of people who had lost everything and did not want to be stripped of their dignity. And in part it was a recognition that these needy sojourners were our neighbors, our fellow citizens--people like us who, through no fault of their own, had been stripped of their homes, jobs, families, and future.

But we also rejected the term refugee because it blemishes the national ego. It is not simply an insult to the evacuees and survivors. The idea of hundreds of thousands of American refugees is a slur on the reputation of the American empire. Refugees come from failed states, from societies and nations that do not or can not provide for their peoples. Refugees come from places where the infrastructures providing law and order, food and water, health and security have crumbled. Refugees come from war zones like Afghanistan and Iraq, places obliterated by bombs and insurgencies, or crippled by embargos and civil wars.

ADMITTING WE HAVE HUNDREDS OF thousands of refugees in America means acknowledging we are, in some sense, a failed state. It means admitting that in four decades of fighting wars on crime, drugs, and terror, and building the world's largest military arsenal and empire we have ignored or abandoned the social safety nets that are meant to protect our citizens and society. It means admitting that tax cuts rob our children and grandchildren of the future we promised to give them. The transformation of a million Americans into refugees was not simply the product of a failed levy or the mismanagement of a single FEMA director. It is the result of a nation that has consistently failed to provide and protect the very infrastructure that makes us a civilization.

The flood of refugees did not arrive in America with Katrina. Thirty-seven million Americans have been trapped in poverty for decades; nearly one of every five American children have long been refugees of our national retreat from the war on poverty; and over 40 million Americans have been standing in line for health care. Katrina just put America's refugees in front of the cameras.

AGAIN AND AGAIN IN SCRIPTURE GOD reminds the Hebrews that they were once a swarming nation of refugees toiling and dying in the Pharaoh's camps, and that the Lord rescued and delivered them safely into the Promised Land, where they must treat the alien and runaway in their midst with God's liberating compassion and justice. Deuteronomy 10:18 tells Israel that "God loves the alien, giving him food and clothing," and Leviticus 19:34 commands the Hebrews to "love the alien as yourself" and "treat the stranger as a native born."

Jesus becomes a refugee in Luke and Matthew's gospels, where Joseph and Mary are forced to go to Bethlehem so the Roman Empire can count and tax its colonized subjects, and where the infant must flee the murderous paranoia of a king who slaughters the local firstborn.

The one who calls us to be good Samaritans was himself a stateless and displaced refugee who fled a failed state, and he reminds us in Matthew 25 that "whatever you do for the least of these, you do for me."

America, like ancient Israel, is a nation of refugees, and we can be proud of how our country made room for millions of immigrants and grateful for the ways these hardworking taxpayers and their children and grandchildren made our nation great.

But Katrina's uncovering of a sea of American "refugees" is a challenge and chastisement to an America that has forgotten its duties to preserve and protect all our people. And these citizen-refugees remind us of our duty to build and maintain the infrastructures that provide safety, security, health, and opportunity to all seeking refuge here.