BANGKOK -- "If America and Thailand were both hit by natural disaster, Thais would handle it better," a Thai lawyer once told me.

I conceded that the average Thai, being rural and village born, was indeed closer to nature and flexible by necessity and that would come in handy in a crisis, though rural life in itself offers scant protection from truly horrendous natural disasters such as plague, famine, earthquake or massive floods. I said with a tinge of pride, that my hometown of New York had taken terrorist attacks and power blackouts very much in stride, though any lasting power outage would be another matter.

I've had the opportunity to revisit that conversation with considerable humility in the past year, first when a powerful killed thousands in southern Thailand last December, and last month, when a hurricane swamped the American deep south, devastating New Orleans.