katrina depression
I have been in a post-9-11-type stupor today, and every evening after A goes to bed, as I obsessively check the drudge report online, and click through all 763 pictures a day on Yahoo of this horrible disaster. I've had horribly violent refugee dreams, and wake up knowing that what these people have experienced was even worse than my nightmares. I have wept many many times, seeing pictures of exhausted babies and moms, who have nothing and nowhere to go, no way to help their poor children. Families separated, living in squalor worthy of the worst tenements in history.
So many conflicting emotions are in my head--not at all like 9-11, when all I wanted was to blast those bastards who did it into a powder. No, this time my thoughts are at odds--why didn't anyone act on this right away like they did for the WTC, especially since they had several days of advance warning? Why weren't all those drowned school buses used to get out the poorest people, away to wherever the hurricane wasn't going to go (that was what Drudge was asking)? Why weren't people stopped from bigtime looting by having adequate amounts of soldiers at the ready, instead of forcing overworked policemen to choose the lesser of evils? The broken windows theory--if there's one broken window, people feel like they can go ahead and break all the rest--applies on a grand, horrible scale here. If I can walk out of a store with a TV (which will be totally useless to me because there's no power to run it), so I can also roam the streets, terrorizing my fellow citizens.
On the other hand, people were told to leave the city. All the projections of a disaster like this were that no one could really survive if they stayed in the city. The Superdome was the last resort. (incidentally, I sincerely hope they burn that hell-hole to the ground after everyone is cleared out.) And I have to be honest, I have never liked New Orleans like I love New York. Even though they are both cess-pools in some ways, with just as much corruption, I find Mardi Gras to be just repugnant exploitation. So I am a prude, you found me out. Same reason I will never set foot in a Hooters. If I had the money, I would buy every one of them and burn them to the ground too. I'm just in a burnin' mood.
I don't know what I really expected to come of a disaster like this--I am 99 percent sure that Baltimore, where I reside, would descend into even deeper chaos than poor New Orleans if such a tragedy occurred here. I mean, we don't even need a hurricane to have rampant violence and evil. But still, somehow I must have thought that people would see that this situation requires a different attitude...but even as I write this, the whole idea strikes me as incredibly naive--of course people are going to exploit the weak, of course drug addicts denied their mainstay will go completely apeshit. Of course, in short, people are inherently inclined to evil.
So why am I so shocked? Why am I so deeply ashamed? I am used to seeing and hearing of barbarism around the world, and throughout history. It seems a precious few places in the world today have no hint of it, when you hear about some suburban psycho who kills his pregnant wife, or turned out to be a sexual predator/murderer even though he's been Mr. Normal for 10 years. Yes, even our cushy suburbs have people in them, which means we have the same capacity for untrammeled evil.
And it's not a racial issue per se, unless you're talking about the human race. I do feel very suspicious that the city was left to fester so long because it's "just poor black people" left. Pretty much, the people who are left are the people who are always left. The poor you will always have with you, Jesus says. He didn't say, because they're always there, you should ignore them and let them rot. He himself was poor, the poorest of the poor. But our country doesn't understand poverty, truly. There is always, ALWAYS in the back of our minds, the idea that poor people can make their lives better, and just choose not to because they are lazy or stupid or both. I can't believe that, even though it is in my mind as well. Even if a poor person can make their lives better, which I do believe, it takes so much more than just determination on that person's part. If all you have ever known is poverty and ignorance, if all your friends and family are as poor as you are, how on earth can you get out of that without superhuman effort, without change going on around you as well? And if the rest of the people in the world are content to let you suffer, and call you stupid and lazy, there really isn't much energy left to try and prove them wrong; you're too busy trying to stay alive.
What angers me most out of all these horrible, despicable things, is that children were in the middle of all this, seeing it all, forced to sleep in urine, living next to rotting dead bodies. They were afraid of nature first, then afraid of desperate men. They were not protected by our government, whose main charge is to keep order and protect the weakest citizens from the strongest. In some sort of mock-memorial to the horror in Beslan a year ago, about 60 employees of a school in New Orleans and their families were held captive there for 2 and a half days. Armed thugs broke in to the school, looted the place, locked the people inside, and fired shots at boats trying to rescue them. The thugs eventually stood down because of the military, and the people were airlifted out to an overpass and waited forever for food and water. A 2 year old girl was one of the captives. Some of the thugs had gone to that school when they were younger. It wasn't some airlift-some-disgruntled-Chechnyan-wackos scenario, but people from their own neighborhood becoming the terrorists.
Increasingly, in my angrier thoughts lately about dads who left their children, babies abandoned, violence and despair in New Orleans, I have wished for God's justice, for him to come through on the promise that in the day of his judgement "it would be better to have a millstone tied around your neck and be cast into the sea, than for the man who causes any one of my little ones to suffer." Psalm 139 also comes to mind, "Oh that you would slay the wicked, O God!"
Who would be left if he did, though?
So many conflicting emotions are in my head--not at all like 9-11, when all I wanted was to blast those bastards who did it into a powder. No, this time my thoughts are at odds--why didn't anyone act on this right away like they did for the WTC, especially since they had several days of advance warning? Why weren't all those drowned school buses used to get out the poorest people, away to wherever the hurricane wasn't going to go (that was what Drudge was asking)? Why weren't people stopped from bigtime looting by having adequate amounts of soldiers at the ready, instead of forcing overworked policemen to choose the lesser of evils? The broken windows theory--if there's one broken window, people feel like they can go ahead and break all the rest--applies on a grand, horrible scale here. If I can walk out of a store with a TV (which will be totally useless to me because there's no power to run it), so I can also roam the streets, terrorizing my fellow citizens.
On the other hand, people were told to leave the city. All the projections of a disaster like this were that no one could really survive if they stayed in the city. The Superdome was the last resort. (incidentally, I sincerely hope they burn that hell-hole to the ground after everyone is cleared out.) And I have to be honest, I have never liked New Orleans like I love New York. Even though they are both cess-pools in some ways, with just as much corruption, I find Mardi Gras to be just repugnant exploitation. So I am a prude, you found me out. Same reason I will never set foot in a Hooters. If I had the money, I would buy every one of them and burn them to the ground too. I'm just in a burnin' mood.
I don't know what I really expected to come of a disaster like this--I am 99 percent sure that Baltimore, where I reside, would descend into even deeper chaos than poor New Orleans if such a tragedy occurred here. I mean, we don't even need a hurricane to have rampant violence and evil. But still, somehow I must have thought that people would see that this situation requires a different attitude...but even as I write this, the whole idea strikes me as incredibly naive--of course people are going to exploit the weak, of course drug addicts denied their mainstay will go completely apeshit. Of course, in short, people are inherently inclined to evil.
So why am I so shocked? Why am I so deeply ashamed? I am used to seeing and hearing of barbarism around the world, and throughout history. It seems a precious few places in the world today have no hint of it, when you hear about some suburban psycho who kills his pregnant wife, or turned out to be a sexual predator/murderer even though he's been Mr. Normal for 10 years. Yes, even our cushy suburbs have people in them, which means we have the same capacity for untrammeled evil.
And it's not a racial issue per se, unless you're talking about the human race. I do feel very suspicious that the city was left to fester so long because it's "just poor black people" left. Pretty much, the people who are left are the people who are always left. The poor you will always have with you, Jesus says. He didn't say, because they're always there, you should ignore them and let them rot. He himself was poor, the poorest of the poor. But our country doesn't understand poverty, truly. There is always, ALWAYS in the back of our minds, the idea that poor people can make their lives better, and just choose not to because they are lazy or stupid or both. I can't believe that, even though it is in my mind as well. Even if a poor person can make their lives better, which I do believe, it takes so much more than just determination on that person's part. If all you have ever known is poverty and ignorance, if all your friends and family are as poor as you are, how on earth can you get out of that without superhuman effort, without change going on around you as well? And if the rest of the people in the world are content to let you suffer, and call you stupid and lazy, there really isn't much energy left to try and prove them wrong; you're too busy trying to stay alive.
What angers me most out of all these horrible, despicable things, is that children were in the middle of all this, seeing it all, forced to sleep in urine, living next to rotting dead bodies. They were afraid of nature first, then afraid of desperate men. They were not protected by our government, whose main charge is to keep order and protect the weakest citizens from the strongest. In some sort of mock-memorial to the horror in Beslan a year ago, about 60 employees of a school in New Orleans and their families were held captive there for 2 and a half days. Armed thugs broke in to the school, looted the place, locked the people inside, and fired shots at boats trying to rescue them. The thugs eventually stood down because of the military, and the people were airlifted out to an overpass and waited forever for food and water. A 2 year old girl was one of the captives. Some of the thugs had gone to that school when they were younger. It wasn't some airlift-some-disgruntled-Chechnyan-wackos scenario, but people from their own neighborhood becoming the terrorists.
Increasingly, in my angrier thoughts lately about dads who left their children, babies abandoned, violence and despair in New Orleans, I have wished for God's justice, for him to come through on the promise that in the day of his judgement "it would be better to have a millstone tied around your neck and be cast into the sea, than for the man who causes any one of my little ones to suffer." Psalm 139 also comes to mind, "Oh that you would slay the wicked, O God!"
Who would be left if he did, though?
1 Comments:
MK, I've been pretty much avoiding the news because of the depression I sunk into after 9-11. I can totally understand your outrage, in fact it is theraputic to read your venting, because I wouldn't dare express the same thoughts aloud--although I do have them. Hope you download George's sermon is was quite appropos. love ya, me
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