Fixing the world Part One

Have you ever had something you knew you needed to write but you were afraid to write it because you knew if you didn't get it just right--if you didn't nail it? Well, lets just say; "bad things, man! Bad things!"To make things just a teeny bit worse, you know with absolute certainty that you will bolloks it all up. The last bit of bother with it is it is simply too big. It is huge--so huge it won't fit inside your head--not all at once. God no! Simply impossible. You musn't take it straight on, you need to nibble. A little about the edges. A bit at a time, but if you ever try to look at the whole thing--and you will just as surely as you will look down when I tell you; "whatever you do, don't look down."--it will be too much.

Katrina isn't a little nibble--it's a huge gaddamned slice. Can't look at it--not straight at it. Got to look a bit over to the left--just off to the side. Look at how slow the president acted. Look at how
stupid it was to not use the busses. How criminal it was to leave the nursing home patients. We need these thing. We need the Army Engineers to blame. We need the city planners and state government. We need to focus our anger. Thousands dead. Not in Iraq. Not in Africa. Not in Malasia, India or Paris. This happened in America and these things don't happen in America. This is not what we pay our hard--earned tax dollars for! Can we get a refund?

We blame. Why? Why is it that before the water is pumped out or before the fire is out. Before the cars get towed. Before anything else--hell, sometimes even before we ask if everybody is okay, we start looking for who we can pin it on. Who's to bless and who's to blame?

Why? Lots and lots and lots of "whys" starting with a city that was built mostly under sea level--one that is sinking( the city not the sea--sea's rising). We constantly and continually ask why and who but for the wrong reason. We look for why and who so we can divide up the bill. We blame so we don't get stuck with the tab. We shout accusations back and forth and just keep our finger's crossed that when the shitstorm ends we are one of the one's left standing.

After we place the blame--after we sacrifice the goat--we go back to business as usual. We fail to address the underlying problem. We need these goats. We need diversions we cannot look this in the face because in it we see death. Not the death of some poor resident of the Big Easy. The death we see is our own. We might say, in that patented dark humor, "well, that's what you get when you live by the beach." Or something more crass. But on some level, we see our own inevitability.

We dont want that. We don't want to know, we don't want to realize that in the grand scheme of things--barring an afterlife--we really don't mean squat. We don't want to realize that with all our amazing technology we can get snuffed out by nothing more than the wind and the rain. We don't want even to think about this. We don't want to think about the possibilities this encapsules. We don't want this thought leading to the idea that maybe we are hurting the planet as that might lead to other thoughts--other guilts. Guilt for things we have done and for things we have refused to do--things we still refuse to do. We don't want this to spiral into a strange sense that maybe we've already been through this before.

We will rebuild New Orleans it seems but I have a bunch of questions I think we should discuss before we start rebuilding.