Tuesday, August 30, 2005

 

working on my ostrich moves

It's weird to think that there's a disaster going on, right in the U.S. I mean, right now outside my window it's drizzling, but nothing bad is happening. It's easy to forget that all hell is breaking loose in the South, especially Louisiana and Mississippi.

I generally avoid the news, except for knowing the facts. As in, I'll read a few articles to be informed, but I'm not one of those people who is addicted to CNN.com or 24 hour news stations. I know that if there's breaking news, I'll hear it, and often, the 24 hour news channels just show stuff over and over, growing panic and not helping much.

But maybe this getting the news once in a while is my version of denial. And it's my way of not acknowledging what's going on.

So, I took a gander on to boston.com (the globe) and cnn.com. Reports said that they're now evacuating the city, including the Superdome and all of the other places that have people still in them. Yikes. I saw an aerial pic of New Orleans, and it looked ridiculous. All the roads were filled with water, as far as the eye could see. Well, everything was deep in water, but it was especially noticable on the streets.

The headlines on cnn.com, although frightening, didn't really touch me. Stuff like "Mississippi flooding up to 6 miles inland", "About 200 critically ill patients being airlifted to safety." It seemed tragic, sure. But somehow manageable.

But then one stopped me in my tracks.

"New Orleans mayor: Bodies being pushed to the side"

Bodies? Bodies? That's not part of the script that I've written in my head.

And then CNN.com had a link to a video of a man talking about losing his wife, she slipped out of his grip. Out of morbid curiosity, I clicked it. article & link: http://www.cnn.com/2005/WEATHER/08/30/katrina/index.html

If you watch it, you'll see that he seems lower income, probably not well-educated. Or perhaps that's grief and shock making him appear that way. He's crying, with kids at his side, and he just lost his wife. Probably for forever.

I was watching it and hating the reporter. I was thinking "How can she not be hugging him right now? Turn off the camera!! The poor man!!!"

But then I noticed something. She was crying. She was listening to the man, and crying because she knew that he had lost his house, his wife, everything important to him. She was crying for all the people that she had met that day, for all of the ruins she had seen and known that each piece of debris that floated by had been part of someone's life.

"Why don't the newscasters cry when they read about people who die? At least they could be decent enough to put just a tear in their eyes." - jack johnson

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