JUST WHEN YOU THINK . . .

Just when I think I can handle it, and just when I'm noticing that the news headlines are getting fainter and fainter, and just when I'm feeling reeeeaaaaal good and proud about the amount of money that NHF is raising to send to Operation Blessing Hurricane Katrina Relief ... I have to turn on Oprah, and she has to be on location in New Orleans, and dang, that woman's good. She's got me going all over again.

Shamefully, this is the first time that I'm hearing the voices of the displaced. The first time! How can that be, a week later? I guess I have just subconsciously ignored the audio and video links on all the newspapers' websites ... it's one thing, you know, to read about tragedy. It's an entirely different thing to watch and hear a father say, "I haven't seen my two children in three days;" or a mother saying, "I'm not letting my daughter go to the bathroom because there are boys waiting there to rape her;" or a young man embrace a reporter, weeping hysterically, crying, "thank you, THANK YOU, for noticing us;" or the silence of a television camera panning one long, desolate, disgusting, dirty street, strewn with garbage, foraging animals, foraging humans, dead bodies, and all the detritus of lives abandoned.

The talk continues about whether this is a race issue. With all due respect, I truly truly believe, from the bottom of my heart that it is. I believe this reluctantly, for I, like all of us, don't want to believe that racism lives. I don't want to acknowledge its ugliness, and I certainly hate the idea that my leaders would institutionalize racism and carry it in the secretmost part of their hearts, enacting it in policy ... or lack thereof. I hate that thought! But, the one thought that I keep coming back to is this: if Chappaqua, Beverly Hills, the Upper East Side, Highland Park, Lake Bluff, Bridgehampton, Alpine, Palm Beach, Carmel, Santa Monica, Scottsdale, or any other such place was hit with like devastation, would the response -- any response, by anyone -- have been quicker and the outpourings more desperate? Eek. I hear the whisper in the back of my head: yes.

But the people most affected by Katrina are the most underrepresented, the most marginalized, the least valued in this society. Look at the television! Watch the news! I can't escape it. That's who they are. Sigh. How do I start to think about why this is? Where does my brain begin? Do I look to politics, or religion, or warped social values, or a human's own poor decisions, or the fall of man? I don't know ... but it just doesn't seem fair, and it doesn't seem right. I'm not looking for someone to blame, although I sense the humanity in me rising up and wanting to do so. Playing the blame game isn't helpful, though it might be temporarily satisfying for the victims, to lash out and attempt to regain some sense of emotional control in times that are totally and miserably chaotic and primitive.

Besides ... blaming people isn't going to help the fact that an entire region is completely and utterly lost, with not even the faintest light at the end of the proverbial tunnel to look toward. I don't know what it's like to be hopeless. I pray to God I never will know. And yet these people ... they are the walking hopeless ... what are we to do? It's a war zone ... no, it's worse than a war zone. War implies technology and strategy and laser pointers and rations and huge tanks that transport millions of people hither and thither. As I read in a news article this morning, it's more like the regression of humanity, back into the dark ages. How hopeless ...

And still, an entire community can stand with Faith Hill and her volunteers to sing "Amazing Grace" ... isn't that amazing?

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