katrina

i have to admit that i did not pay much attention to the impact of hurricane katrina for a few days after the fact. i was too busy yammering about my wonderful retreat and my class and my poverty (ha). i don't watch much news on TV and we don't subscribe to the newspaper.

then on tuesday my hairdresser asked me if i had seen the pictures of the aftermath of the hurricane on the news. i lied and told her that i had. she told me about the devastation in new orleans, that she and some friends had planned to be there for halloween but now it looked as if that weren't going to happen.

my sister emailed me the next day and asked if had seen the news. she wrote that it seemed as if the world were ending.

my roommate then started commenting to me about the news she was reading online about the hurricane. horror stories about a brother shooting his sister in the head for a bag of ice. women being raped in the the superdome. looting. people desperate for food and water. for their survival.

this summer i read a book called _blindness_ by josé saramago. the book was about a mysterious disease that ovetook a city that caused people, one by one, to go blind. at first, the government rounded up the blind people and placed them in quarantine. because the government wanted no contact with the contaminated people, they placed food for them at a distance and ordered them to organize themselves to deal with distribution of food, burial of dead, managing disease, etc. the novel focuses on the anarchy of the blind on the inside. their struggles for power, struggles to resist being dominated, the violence that ensues.

the blurb on the book's back cover says something to the effect that this novel exposes the darkest parts of the human heart.

now, as a i watch the news and see the images of new orleans, hear the horror stories, i can't help but compare it to saramago's _blindness_. i admit that i want to turn off the TV and ignore the news, just as i wanted to put that book down while i was reading it. this is more horrifying because it's real. the desperation and the mayhem.

it seems unfathomable that anything this devastating could happen to a city like new orleans. it is firmly fixed in american culture and history. but we watch the events unfold and realize, as my roommate said, that that city is never going to be the same.

the new horror that has set in over the past day or so is my realization that the government has been slow to respond. i just read a letter that michael moore wrote to president bush. he asks, where are the helicopters to help rescue people? where is the national guard? what about the money that was supposed to help reinforce the structure of the levies that broke and flooded the city?

all of it has gone to iraq.

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