When Home Hits You Smack in the Face

The thing about working in the news is that it sometimes takes a period of time for the subject that you're focusing on to sink in at a personal level. When a story breaks, you're busy covering it as quickly and accurately as possible, and then you need time to get over the exhaustion of dealing with it. Even when your coworkers get pulled into the story somehow, you're looking at it on a professional level to an extent. But eventually, if you have a morsel of human heart inside the cynical shell we have to put on, it hits you, and since you've seen so much in the course of covering the story, it sometimes hits you harder.

Today I had that moment with the destruction of Katrina. It was a day off, and I had a lot of very important personal things to do. But in the background, I had CNN on. In between tasks, I read my personal weblog of people I've grown to know on the internet, and heard heartbreak and anger and loss all over the place. Then I found out that at least one person I know, who was one of the first people in my memories of childhood, is - at the very least - unaccessable in the area. And over time, I started seeing all of those pictures and video and it crept in that no, this wasn't a faraway place where people I didn't really know about lived. And this wasn't an intentional act where I could lay my grief and anger down on a specific target. This was the toughest part of the cycle of life, a natural, unavoidable catastrophe, and it's playing out in a place that I know. I've been on that corner of Bourbon Street where the shop caught fire today in the middle of the flood waters. I've eaten Po-Boys in a little Mom-and-Pop joint in Biloxi that most likely is not even there anymore. I rode across the Gulf Coast multiple times, from Gulfport to Navarre Beach, when it was vacation time and my relatives wanted to see the beautiful sites of our heritage, from Jefferson Davis' home to the USS Alabama. And now if I am ever blessed to have another child, I won't be able to share that same experience with my kid. Even more awful, entire families aren't around to have ANY experiences, and a whole beautiful city has been, for all intents and purposes, lost. And as hard as it is to comprehend, it's even harder to stare that reality in the face.

There's so many thoughts jumbled up in my mind about this. I could put on my usual media analyst cap and critique the (mostly excellent) coverage on CNN, as well as the amazing coverage of WWL-TV under the worst of circumstances. I could link to a million sites that I've found with a mixture of information and devastation, where people are using the Internet to try to find each other and help each other. I could bitch about the President (however, the NYT did it for me.) I could go off on a rant about the rants that people have been posting all over the blogosphere. I could talk about Southerners and how we've lost everything before and rebuilt again. I could talk about how thankful I am to have what I have, and how ungrateful and unworthy I feel. I could even talk about hearing Alan Jackson's "Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning" at Wal-Mart and almost falling to pieces. But I can't. Words don't fit anymore in any of this. And I don't feel like it's my place to say anything, or do more than try to support those whom I can. This is the one time in my life where I think that it's important to just stop and listen, and then grieve quietly. So I will.