Katrina

Images from the disaster are burned into my brain. For the last 4 nights I've woken up in a panic about floods or thirst or being trapped. And then, when I close my eyes and try to snuggle close to my baby for some physical reassurance and to bathe in that healing baby smell of milk breath, the images come back as if I actually had some remote connection to the hurricane. I don't. I'm about as far away as you can get, geographically and socio-economically and racially. But then, I'm a mom, and as I read somewhere once, the ache of mothering is at once heart-wrenching and pure joy. So with these profound feelings constantly tugging at me, I see pictures of little ones, babies in diapers, who have been through such hell and I'm overwhelmed. I hate cliche psych terms, but I really am having a hard time processing. I've been sitting her for close to two hours cycling through the hundreds of pictures of the disaster trying to find something that will make me feel less bad. Mostly, I just can't believe what a pile of shit our government is for screwing this up in the most screw-uppy way imaginable. It makes me sick. Sick. I am now flipping off Bush, FEMA, Homeland Insecurity and Paris Hilton. A bunch of people -400?- that were staying at the Hyatt (they had food, water and comforts whilst waiting for the evactuation to occur) got to cut in line, in front of thousands of people that were starving and dying at the convention center, and get loaded on the buses to get out of New Orleans. I would like to blame that on Paris Hilton. Yeah, I know, but it makes about as much sense as Chertoff saying it was the city or state's fault that evacuation was screwed up.