Media are already massaging treatments of 9-eleven's 10th anniversary, an event that indelibly marked where you were and what you were doing when deadly evil was intentionally unleashed against an unsuspecting people.
Terrorists who launched the 9-eleven attacks were murderers. The continuous barrage of one-two punches of water and wind were delivered by Mother Nature, square on the chin of the Gulf Coast. The storm, the evil named Katrina, was a murderer and thief.
Today, Louisianans and other Gulf Coast residents are exactly two weeks from the anniversary of deadly evil in the form of natural disaster being unleashed upon them.
Unlike 9-eleven, Katrina's coming elicited warnings, and for those who had the means and desire to leave, time. Others prayed, hoped, bet or entrenched themselves in denial that 'The Storm' would miss the overlays of bullseyes on the Crescent City, drawn onto weather maps wherever one looked.
The breadth of the storm strong-armed 7 states in the Gulf region, so powerful that even Kentucky and Ohio flooded from 'The Big Muddy'--the Mississippi River--unable to contain rains whose totals were measured at 15 inches inside of a week. Ironically, some rain-measuring stations didn't survive the pummeling.
Water and winds laid waste to more than 275,000 homes in the Gulf Coast area. Katrina's storm surge measured 27 feet in Mississippi and 22 feet in Louisiana. Winds of 175 miles per hour added to the water's killing force, the other voice in devastation's duet.
Katrina killed 1,836. Another 705 souls are still listed as missing.
The human toll. The property toll. Where 600,000 pets were killed or left homeless, why 1/3 of New Orleans residents are not there, today. A third. One in 3.
With the storm claiming more than 400,000 jobs, all those homes, all those people, all the terror a natural disaster can deliver to the materiel and to the psyche, to what could one cling?
Hope. Will. Effort.
In New Orleans, she didn't mess much with Bourbon Street. She didn't kill the music. She didn't steal the resolve of those who stayed and survived or those who returned. She couldn't take human spirit, the will to endure and trudge toward recovery.
She couldn't because it's the South and it has risen. It has risen to the task of going on, taking steps to recover with rolled-up sleeves, a collective eye on the future, and the other collective eye on the upcoming hurricane season with the possibility that one of Katrina's wayward relatives may make an uninvited, unavoidable visit.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment