shereads
Sloganless
- Joined
- Jun 6, 2003
- Posts
- 19,242
in the order that I stopped believing them:
- Carnival rides only seemed scary. The Tilt-A-Whirl wouldn't actually snap and hurl kids to their deaths.
- Okay, carnival rides might be risky but even the scariest roller coaster at Disney World was perfectly safe because their lawyers wouldn't have it any other way.
- If the nightly news showed a woman going into labor in the back seat of an abandoned car on a freeway where hundreds of people were slowly dying of dehydration, they'd be broadcasting from a third world country. Not an American city. People don't die of thirst a few city blocks from tourist bars that serve rum drinks in souvenir glasses the size of a man's boot.
- The cavalry always comes to the rescue.
- Dogs don't sweat.
I am writing this from a hotel near the decaying jungle compound, which has been without electricity or phone service since Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Miami as a a mere category one storm, which is an insultingly weak hurricane to cause so much inconvenience and discomfort.
I'd like to say I toughed it out for nearly a week before wasting money on a hotel room, but the truth is, the hotels didn't have electricity either or I'd have been here as soon as I learned that the power company wasn't promising my neighborhood anything until tomorrow night. Dogs might not sweat, but when we were without a/c, mine left a dog-shaped damp place on the tile whenever she found the energy to stand up. Maybe it wasn't sweat, but clear mildew.
The day Katrina left South Florida and began to pick up strength in the Gulf of Mexico, I was on the cell phone reassuring my mom that I was okay, and bitching about the heat and the spoiled food in the freezer, and the mosquitos and the downed trees. She mentiioned she'd had a call from her favorite cousin in Biloxi. The cousin who introduced my parents to each other, and whose husband died a year after my dad. We hoped my mom's cousin wouldn't lose her electricity when Katrina hit the gulf coast. She's in her eighties and lives alone; she calls my mom for moral support when her daughter and grandkids bug her to move to New Mexico so they can look after her. She loves her house and friends in Biloxi too much to move, and her husband is buried there; the kids don't understand how hard the change would be.
It's been a harder change than she expected, and it came out of the blue. I hope she's alive to know how bad it is, and mourn for what she's lost, and move on.
I read a letter to the editor in my complimentary copy of USA Today from some righteous ass in Ohio who implied that people who fail to evacuate from an approaching hurricane have no one but themselves to blame. Anyone who lives on the Gulf or Atlantic coast knows what an idiotic statement that is, even for storms that are tracked all the way from Africa. For every hit, there are half a dozen or more misses, and if we evacuated every time there was a hurricane watch or even a warning, we couldn't hold down jobs or send our kids to school. Add the complications of old age or poverty, and it's easy to understand how so many were trapped in Katrina's path.
What isn't easy to understand is why, when the Army Corps of Engineers knew that New Orleans' levee system was only rated to withstand a category 3 storm, the money was never spent to upgrade the system. Politicians who chose to spend the money elsewhere can call this disaster unpredictable until they turn blue. They can pretend there was no way to prevent it; people in the Netherlands know better.
What happened to New Orleans happened because somewhere in the budgeting process, the risk wasn't considered worth the expense. Denial is a powerful thing; how easy must it be to deny that a major city will disappear overnight because of something we failed to do?
Why the National Guard is on the other side of the planet instead of guarding the nation is another topic, and until the A/C in this hotel room cranks up sufficiently, even an unapologetic Bush Basher doesn't have the energy to get into it.
Here are two more things I used to know with absolute certainty:
- Respectable middle-class military widows with lovely old homes in Bible Belt towns don't disappear without a trace, when they were just on the phone with your mom a few hours before. This is America, home of Bellsouth and AT&T and the Red Cross and FEMA. We can't just lose people.
- Southern ladies like my mom's Biloxi cousin use so much White Rain Hair Spray, a strong wind doesn't phase them.
These were matters of faith. I'm just about out of it, but if she's alive, I hope my mother's favorite cousin is able to hang onto hers until help comes. Maybe the cavalry is on the way.
- Carnival rides only seemed scary. The Tilt-A-Whirl wouldn't actually snap and hurl kids to their deaths.
- Okay, carnival rides might be risky but even the scariest roller coaster at Disney World was perfectly safe because their lawyers wouldn't have it any other way.
- If the nightly news showed a woman going into labor in the back seat of an abandoned car on a freeway where hundreds of people were slowly dying of dehydration, they'd be broadcasting from a third world country. Not an American city. People don't die of thirst a few city blocks from tourist bars that serve rum drinks in souvenir glasses the size of a man's boot.
- The cavalry always comes to the rescue.
- Dogs don't sweat.
I am writing this from a hotel near the decaying jungle compound, which has been without electricity or phone service since Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Miami as a a mere category one storm, which is an insultingly weak hurricane to cause so much inconvenience and discomfort.
I'd like to say I toughed it out for nearly a week before wasting money on a hotel room, but the truth is, the hotels didn't have electricity either or I'd have been here as soon as I learned that the power company wasn't promising my neighborhood anything until tomorrow night. Dogs might not sweat, but when we were without a/c, mine left a dog-shaped damp place on the tile whenever she found the energy to stand up. Maybe it wasn't sweat, but clear mildew.
The day Katrina left South Florida and began to pick up strength in the Gulf of Mexico, I was on the cell phone reassuring my mom that I was okay, and bitching about the heat and the spoiled food in the freezer, and the mosquitos and the downed trees. She mentiioned she'd had a call from her favorite cousin in Biloxi. The cousin who introduced my parents to each other, and whose husband died a year after my dad. We hoped my mom's cousin wouldn't lose her electricity when Katrina hit the gulf coast. She's in her eighties and lives alone; she calls my mom for moral support when her daughter and grandkids bug her to move to New Mexico so they can look after her. She loves her house and friends in Biloxi too much to move, and her husband is buried there; the kids don't understand how hard the change would be.
It's been a harder change than she expected, and it came out of the blue. I hope she's alive to know how bad it is, and mourn for what she's lost, and move on.
I read a letter to the editor in my complimentary copy of USA Today from some righteous ass in Ohio who implied that people who fail to evacuate from an approaching hurricane have no one but themselves to blame. Anyone who lives on the Gulf or Atlantic coast knows what an idiotic statement that is, even for storms that are tracked all the way from Africa. For every hit, there are half a dozen or more misses, and if we evacuated every time there was a hurricane watch or even a warning, we couldn't hold down jobs or send our kids to school. Add the complications of old age or poverty, and it's easy to understand how so many were trapped in Katrina's path.
What isn't easy to understand is why, when the Army Corps of Engineers knew that New Orleans' levee system was only rated to withstand a category 3 storm, the money was never spent to upgrade the system. Politicians who chose to spend the money elsewhere can call this disaster unpredictable until they turn blue. They can pretend there was no way to prevent it; people in the Netherlands know better.
What happened to New Orleans happened because somewhere in the budgeting process, the risk wasn't considered worth the expense. Denial is a powerful thing; how easy must it be to deny that a major city will disappear overnight because of something we failed to do?
Why the National Guard is on the other side of the planet instead of guarding the nation is another topic, and until the A/C in this hotel room cranks up sufficiently, even an unapologetic Bush Basher doesn't have the energy to get into it.
Here are two more things I used to know with absolute certainty:
- Respectable middle-class military widows with lovely old homes in Bible Belt towns don't disappear without a trace, when they were just on the phone with your mom a few hours before. This is America, home of Bellsouth and AT&T and the Red Cross and FEMA. We can't just lose people.
- Southern ladies like my mom's Biloxi cousin use so much White Rain Hair Spray, a strong wind doesn't phase them.
These were matters of faith. I'm just about out of it, but if she's alive, I hope my mother's favorite cousin is able to hang onto hers until help comes. Maybe the cavalry is on the way.
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