Douglas Alexander: “I will talk this morning about helping all of Katrina's displaced schoolchildren. Each weekend when I go home to…”

“I will talk this morning about helping all of Katrina's displaced schoolchildren. Each weekend when I go home to Tennessee, the people who elected me teach me about how we should be doing our jobs in Washington, DC. This is not a lesson they shout from the rooftops. It is a lesson they live by their own example, and we would be wise to follow. Two weeks ago in Maryville, my hometown, it was Al Gore flying a planeload of evacuees from New Orleans into one of Tennessee's most Republican counties. Nobody asked about anybody's politics. Everybody just pitched in to help. Last weekend, members of the church where I am an elder, Westminster Presbyterian Church in Nashville, sent $80,000 and a truckload of clothes and Clorox to southern Mississippi. ``The Presbyterians are here,'' one grateful Mississippi man relayed to his friends on his cell phone to say, ``and they have Clorox.'' When the Clorox was passed out, nobody asked if anybody was a Presbyterian. And now this Sunday, the headline in the Tennessean, the Nashville newspaper, was: Private schools Welcome Those Displaced by Katrina. According to the newspaper: A growing number of private schools in Middle Tennessee [in the Nashville area] . . . have volunteered to help students displaced by Katrina. Many of them are also waiving or drastically discounting tuition and fees for these students and some also accept evacuees from public schools. Continuing the quote, ``These children are in crisis.…”