Because I live far enough north to have not been directly effected by Katrina or Rita last year, I'd kinda managed to put all the shock and awe in a jar, and on a shelf in my brain. Well, now that the first anniversary is rolling around, the media is preparing a blitz of programming designed to knock that jar down and bust it.
On one hand, I totally understand that there are still many many people who still live with the realities of the storms and the destruction every single day - and, I'm pretty sure they are utterly sick and tired of just surviving day to day. I know there are plenty of folks who have managed to piece together something that kinda looks and feels like something approaching normal life. And, I know that scores of humans will forever shudder over the sound of wind and rain sweeping over their rooftops.
On the other, I'm not looking forward to those feelings of helplessness and overwhelming sadness coming back. I know they are coming back because already, the preview commercials have brought back the tears. Even as I type this, my eyes are beginning to swim a bit. Perhaps it is an exercise in self-indulgent emotion, but, it still makes me sad that the storms were so horrible and that the response was scattered, piecemeal, and delayed.
Hopefully, in time, there will be healing and peace. I've always heard that the more man-made a horror - the harder it is to recover from. Hopefully this feat of mother nature will be one of those things that man-made responses can actually fix.
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