Overcome by Events

I wanted to finish my funny story about the trip to North Carolina. Really. But the events of this past week, the horrific images from the Gulf Coast, have just flattened me. Maybe in a few days I'll be able to muster up a comic mood and tell you about the long wait at the Chicago airport, the funny-talking Southerners traveling with us, the chewing gum episode and all the rest of it. But for now, I can't stop thinking about New Orleans and Biloxi, Waveland and Slidell, can't quite get my mind around the reality that we've lost an entire major city and a slew of small towns. I can't believe that people had to wait, trapped in their own attics, standing in contaminated water up to their necks, day after day after day, and still no one came to rescue them. I can't fathom that tens of thousands of people, from infants to the elderly, were stranded without food or even water for nearly a week while bureaucrats bungled an emergency response they could have launched even before the storm arrived. I don't understand how anyone can support a president who has inflicted such grievous injuries on the nation, done so much damage in so short a time. I can't comprehend why some of my own family still think he's just what America needs. The lies, the paranoia of this administration make Nixon and his band of burglars look quaint. I am sick when I think of it, the religious hypocrisy, the liberties we've lost in the name of national security, the lives wasted in Iraq, and now the bodies floating in the streets of New Orleans, the homes and histories lost, and mostly, mostly, those desperate dark faces in the attics, waiting, praying, ebbing, dying for help that never comes. God forgive us.