Kids Say the Darndest Things

From a Q&A with New Orleans native Nick Lemann in the current New Yorker:
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After storms like Betsy passed, was there a sense of relief—that the city had somehow escaped the worst?

I’ll be honest and tell you that, as with many things like this in life, from the perspective of a kid it’s just a fun experience. The movie “Hope and Glory,” by John Boorman, explores this idea. It’s about British kids during the Second World War, and it’s very good at capturing how something that is objectively awful registers on children as a sort of adventure. That was how Hurricane Betsy was for me. I remember it vividly. I remember being briefly frightened, but then thinking that it was fascinating to live through something like this, and to be able to go around paddling boats through the streets and things like that.
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Ah, children... Today, NPR's "This American Life" played some interviews with kids in the Astrodome who declared they'd never had so much fun in their lives as during the general anarchy in New Orleans and the first few days in the Houston refugee camps. Future looters of America, apparently.