I’ve been bad. . .
. . .about blogging the past few days. As in, I haven’t. Not that I haven’t tried. Several times. But somehow, the tone was never right. Either too maudlin or too flippant. Massive devastation and destruction will do that to the creative process.
It just feels so wrong, going about my normal life when it will be months, if not longer, before so many others even begin to resume something approximating “normal.” It almost makes me wonder if, sometimes, we’re motivated to donate to relief efforts more out of guilt than compassion. A mixture of both, I suppose. Although in the long run, I doubt seriously whether the victims give a damn why people give, as long as they do.
But for all I’ve been glued to the TV or online, becoming more and more stunned about Katrina’s aftermath, I have to remember there’s a 10-year-old in the house. And while nothing says he shouldn’t understand what’s going on, and feel compassion, he is, after all, only ten. Children feel more vulnerable as it is without taking on burdens they’re far too young to understand, let alone shoulder. As it happens, his English assignment — complete sentences vs. sentence fragments — happened to focus on storms. Complete coincidence — that’s just what came up next in the book — but ack! By the time he looked up at me, clearly worried about losing our home or that something would happen to the cats, I realized we needed to back off a bit.
If something horrible happened, God forbid, we’d deal with it. But awful things happen in the world every single day, things that would drive most adults over the edge if constantly dwelled on. Our babies don’t need that. Right now, the biggest issue in his life should be getting his homework done. He’s got seventy or more years ahead of him to deal with all the rest of it.
Not to sound insensitve, mom, because I’m not trying to be, I think it’s completely terrible for those people down south, but America is spending billions and billions of dollars, funding a failing war. A war whose sole purpose is to secure oil, or should I say money, that that we have no right to anyway. And then, the government has the audacity to let gas prices rise. Mostly in the part of the country hit hardest by the storm. The oil rigs that got damaged in the Gulf of Mexico only provide a small percentage of the oil we use in America, so that’s not a real excuse to raise prices. The thing that saddens me the most is the lack of effort by the government to actually help. Fire trucks from New York were on the scene before most of the National Guard. You know why? The National Guard is stationed around the wrong Gulf. So, I don’t mean to hurt anyone’s feelings, but I rant because I truly care, and I want everyone affected by the storm to get as much help as they possibly can.
Comment by Gareth — September 3, 2005 @ 5:43 pm
Leave it to one of my own kids to take the blog down a road I really didn’t want it to go, right?
But he knows my own feelings on the subject, so ’nuff said.
However, the lack of a speedy, concerted response has everybody stunned, perplexed and upset. Not to sound flippant, but I keep thinking the average wedding planner could have handled things more efficiently than the various government agencies involved in this fiasco. I just don’t understand how they can say they didn’t know what was going on, or the scope of the problem, due to communication problems, when anyone with access to the nightly news could see for themselves how bad things were.
Maybe I missed something (it’s been known to happen), but I kinda thought the whole point of Homeland Security was to be prepared for mass disasters of this nature, to have plans and supplies and medical contingencies already in place in order to prevent the kind of unmitigated nightmare this has become.
We look like idiots. And vulnerable idiots at that. Yeah, that’s really the message we want to send to the rest of the world.
Comment by Karen Templeton — September 4, 2005 @ 5:55 pm
Sorry for going all political, but I never committed to the content of my comments : ) Besides, you capped it off nicely.
Comment by Gareth — September 5, 2005 @ 1:09 am