Message #28989

[Tempest]

(Me - 09/03/05)

The purpose of this topic is to explore the very real side effects that occur when a disaster of the kind we have seen this week comes, strikes, and destroys. I'd like to look at the effects these calamities have had throughout history on both places and people. Naturally some of this has to do with Atlantis, and yet that is only the academic part of it. The part that currently concerns both my heart and my feelings has to do with what has happened to New Orleans.

The hurricane tore up the coastline of the Gulf Coast. It picked up whole buildings and deposited them in other places. It left some areas buried under twenty feet of water, it might take six months to get all the water out. The infrastructure might never be repaired. The entire city is being evacuated, a city that once held nearly five hundred thousand people is to become a ghost town, the only people left will be the dead and they dying.

And the dead are everywhere, sitting in wheelchairs, lying in attics, abandoned on highways. If ever there was a time that people should come together, than this is it.

The Mayor wanted to evacuate the city before the hurricane struck, and many people did try to leave. It's important to realize that many of people that couldn't get away are the ones that couldn't get away - the poor, the infirm, people who had no choice but to stay.

Many died, many of those who stayed lost everything, even their loved ones.

Those in and around centers in and around refugee centers had to wait four days to even get any real help. Sure they can get food for one day, who knows about the next.

It will be weeks before we can get the final scope of just how great the tragedy was. Who knows how many people will have died, maybe less than the 9 to 12,000 that died in Galveston in 1900, maybe easily more than the 3,000 that died on September 11. Certainly it will be the greatest natural disaster to ever hit the United States in our lifetime.

No matter what the final number is, we have all lost something this week. I will never again look at my life and feel bad about things because it isn't going the way I want. I'll know that things could always be worse.
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