FADE AWAY . . .

The news reported this morning that during last night's NBC telethon for hurricane relief, rapper Kanye West departed from script, and lambasted Shrub for not caring about black people. Instead of my heart rising up and rebelling against such an inflammatory and needless comment, I was dismayed to find myself responding with the thought," my God, what if Kanye is right? What if Shrub doesn't care about black people? What the hell kind of country am I living in where my leader might not care about an entire segment of his citizenry? And what does this mean for us in these times?" I am not normally an inflammatory kind o' gal. I don't like to use race as an excuse, a platform, a reason, a justification, a label with which to point fingers and place blame. But this morning, I saw a glimpse of the validity of a throw-away comment ... and it scared me and broke my heart all over again, as if that were even possible.

And so, now, I look at the news again. And I see all the black Americans looking back at me. They -- whoever "they" are -- are right: everyone I see is black. Black Americans in undershirts, trying to stay cool. Black Americans with their heads in their hands, utterly defeated. Black Americans holding their babies, unable to provide the nourishment that is the urge of any parent to provide. Black Americans waiting in line to enter the Houston SuperDome. Black Americans waiting in line for water, food, the bathroom, the bus, the airplane. Black Americans looting and being looted. Black Americans in pain I can't even comprehend in the worst of my nightmares. Can it really, truly, be that Shrub would not care about these people?

I wonder what it would take to convince Shrub that these Black Americans are just like him, just like me? That but for the oddity of circumstance and choice, it would be he and I living in the Gulf States, and not in the high and dry lands of the Northeast? That it is not a job to care for your citizens, it is a human calling? Would he understand me? Or does the beckoning call of air conditioning and sanitation and nourishment ring too loudly in his ears?

Maybe I could just tell him that the best antidote to noticing the blackness of our fellow man is to keep staring, to keep looking, to keep watching, to keep listening, to resist the temptation to avert one's eyes and turn away because it's too much to absorb. I can't look away, and so I read the same reports over and over again, from The New York Times, from CNN, from New York's Daily News, from NBC, from The Journal News, from MSNBC, from Yahoo! News. I gaze at the same pictures, lifting Bob up to my face so I can look more deeply into the eyes of the hopeless. I can smell, through my computer screen, the stink of death, body odor, excrement, garbage, rotting and fear. I stare at the elderly sick, lying on cots in Louis Armstrong International Airport, and the healthy -- for now -- young, lined up with garbage bags filled with their meager belongings, awaiting shelter. The more I stare, the more I smell, the more I look into the tear-filled eyes of some unknown woman, trying to communicate to her that we're coming and we haven't abandoned them, the more I see that they are neither as black as they seem and I am neither as yellow as I seem. The reality is, there are ties that bind person to person, and these can only be discovered by looking into the whites of one's eyes.

Shrub, you're pretty white, but you're probably not as white as you seem either. Take a look, would you? And for the record, Kanye is pretty cool ... but I relish the moment that you might prove him wrong.