If you haven’t already heard (or seen, or read), tornadoes in the southern U.S. killed at least 200 people last night and caused untold damage. The tornado season has gotten off to a devastating start in the midwest and in the south.

Being from Kansas, I’ve had tornado safety drilled into my mind practically from birth. A microburst hit my college town in March 2006, and I’ve spent untold numbers of spring and summer evenings hiding out in the basement watching or listening to the weather forecasts, occasionally peeking out the window to look at thunderstorms, hail and the eerie green stillness that only comes when something awful is about to happen. So, learning what’s happened in the south, I can commiserate with what the poor people down there are going through.

I’ve also read various stories about the storms on Gawker and The Huffington Post. While the stories themselves were sympathetic or at least innocuous, I was shocked and disgusted at the tone of many reader comments. Cracking jokes about God’s judgment and the Wizard of Oz, calling the storms retribution for “birtherism,” telling southerners they had no right to expect disaster aid — this is compassion? I by no means consider myself a conservative or a Tea Party member, but these tasteless comments from so-called enlightened liberals made me extraordinarily angry. Tornadoes do not care whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, I promise.

As a Kansan, I’m used to people automatically assuming that I’m uneducated, live on a farm, hate gays and disbelieve evolution. Southerners are often the victims of stereotyping that’s at least that annoying if not worse. But to bring it out when people are dead and dying through no fault of their own, frankly, makes me sick.

What makes it more galling is that most of these people no doubt consider themselves to be open-minded, educated and tolerant. The same people who’d be offended if these comments were slung at gays, minorities or liberals in general have no qualms tossing them at people from an “inferior” region. (For the record, I abhor blanket statements about any demographic.) Many of them self-identify as being from parts of the U.S. like the northeast, which doesn’t typically have as many tornadoes as the midwest and south; do they know what it’s like to cower in your basement and have the very real fear that at any second, without warning, your home may be blown away?

And yes, many people in the south (and elsewhere) express a dislike for government handouts. Does this mean that in their hour of need, we should tell them, “No disaster relief for you”? No. Why? Because we’re supposed to be better than that. If we show a lack of compassion to those who lack it themselves, how are we better? How does that set an example and help people to change their minds? It doesn’t. In pointing out some southerners’ hypocrisy regarding federal assistance, some people have equally made hypocrites of themselves.

The Red Cross is accepting donations on behalf of people in the south affected by the storms. Please make a contribution.