prayer

So I sometimes try to be funny on this blog; it's because of the relationship between an actual nuthouse and a factual funny farm.
But today I want to include a straight-faced prayer for the victims of Katrina. I am quite concerned by the suggestion that the relief efforts especially in New Orleans are being mishandled because so many of the citizens of the city are poor and/or black. As is always the case after a natural disaster --- or a man-made one, it's possible to watch a lot of TV or read the news or hear it on the radio and be misled. Generally there is an effort to give the impression that Everything Possible is being done.
This may not be the case. I find myself going along with what some people I respect are saying --- however I have not seen evidence with my own eyes and i have no way to really judge. Am I stuck in the kind of denial white folks can get into because they want everything to be hunky dory??? So maybe there was a traffic jam at one point that delayed a huge number of busses on their way to pick up people at the Superdome, for example.
Whatever the case, I feel helpless, frustrated, and annoyed because this disaster comes at a time when I have SO much on my plate --- by which I don't mean food, in fact food on the plate is a little hard to come by, as
my first paycheck doesn't come until the end of this month. Because of this I have no money to donate, which makes me feel helpless and frustrated. Oh, I already listed those adjectives, and added ANNOYED.
The last one is most relevant because of the comments I received on my ECE today --- apparently my mentor thought she ought to do her job, and give my essay a careful, thorough reading. Oh yeah, she did. And I have less than two weeks to pretty much do a quintuple bypass on the thing.
Maybe something's wrong with my work ethic, because I feel like the ECE is low on my list of priorities, which is to say if I really had my druthers I'd head for a hilltop and spend two weeks in prayer and meditation.

Back to New Orleans: they're running their mouths now about how things are "getting better" --- one man said that we'll talk for years about why relief (fifty truckloads of stuff) didn't come earlier than Friday, but on Friday "We have the sense a corner has been turned." Now I'm in that kind of sullen mood, after seeing thousands of people camped out by a highway being passed over by the convoy of yellow schoolbusses. After seeing some "heartwarming" stories --- a white family in town on their kid's college tour rescued by a private contractor, a white/hispanic family welcomed into a another family's home in Texas. Is it my imagination or did neither of these heartwarming stories feature a black family??? Am I simply not sitting down in front of the TV at the right moments to witness all the outpouring of benevolence toward non-white people? I will admit that I can only take the disaster area in doses. I should say I have the luxury of being able to take it in doses. I heard a man repeat several times: "WHY DO I HAVE TO BE A PART OF THIS???" How many of us TV-watchers are slowing down enough to try to imagine how a person who would say this FEELS, a person who has had nothing to eat or drink for four days and probably little sleep. I believe I have mainly had this feeling in nightmares. There's a chill involved, a dread, a fear that nothing will be good again, a lack of hope. Of course, the biggest culprit is Katrina. But we the people and the government whom we elected should be doing everything humanly possible, I mean going to every length and more, to make this horrific situation better.

It's almost midnight; I haven't had the heart to do a stitch of work on my ECE, partly because the TV is on, partly because of the surgery my mentor demands. I don't want to be p-o-ed all the time, it actually makes me hurt physically --- and emotionally. But I'm in awe of the challenge my mentor has given me, not in good awe but bad awe, if I can make that distinction. It's the kind of awe you feel when you've just had a car wreck, and you're looking over the damage to your vehicle. The kind of awe that Katrina has inspired.

Anyone sleeping in a bed at home tonight should be grateful, in other words I should be grateful, I know, but it's been occuring to me lately that gratitude isn't enough. Counting one's blessings is sometimes little more than a heartwarming mental exercise, there has to be something more if one is going to have a positive effect on the world beyond one's suburban driveway. SHARING one's blessings is something like what i have in mind. Have I shared one penny of my vast wealth today, one cookie out of my bottomless cookie jar, one smile out of my repertoire of happy smiles???

I've shared a piece of my mind, and that has benefitted exactly WHOM??? I've shared my anger, fear and insecurity with everyone I've spoken to or e-mailed this whole day, and perhaps the only recipients of untainted kindness from me from the time I rolled out of the wrong side of bed this morning have been dogs and cats. Oh yeah, and the little black puppy ran away, the same day Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast.
To anyone who has accompanied my train of thought this far: may your minds and hearts find peace and comfort. And to God: may those affected by this wretched situation find peace and comfort, as well as food and drink and clothing and hope that they will again have a roof over their heads.

---Harriet