exposed

I've posted in a few threads about how angry I felt when I read the bit about Karl Rove trying to blame his failures on environmental groups. I've been searching for ways to channel that fury into productive (or at least not self-destructive) activities. And I'm still looking, but I guess some of it has already converted into horror and sadness and lethargy, so I've started musing.

I was thinking about kid oakland's observation that we're all so enraged and scared by the hurricane news that we basically started to eat each other. (Virtually, at least.) We've all seen the pictures of the battered Teflon roof of the Superdome, which exposed all the frightened people inside to the wrath of the wind and rain. We saw how the government failed those people too, and its failures exposed the structural racism and the terrible urban poverty we all try to keep quiet  because it is so cruel it's hard to think about.

And the Rove story was another level of exposure for me - not so much in revealing the revolting venal depths that he and his ilk can reach, but in revealing to me that I can still be shocked. The protective layers of cynicism and sarcasm evolved to cope with the Bush years abruptly tore themselves apart (like the curtain in the Temple  when Jesus died, it felt so dramatic at the time). On one level the story isn't shocking; it's just another day at work for Karl. But all the horror of the rest of the Katrina story got tied up in that one tidbit for me, and I got mad. So mad that the usual mechanisms for outrage - letters to the editor, ranting to friends, drinking heavily, etc., seemed pointless and I had to take stock of what would actually make me feel like I was getting something done - a real commitment I've been reluctant to make.

Other things about my existence have also been exposed to me in the last couple of weeks since my partner moved to NYC to start her new job. Things like I depend on her a little too much for companionship and should spend more time on my own goals and trivial pursuits. I knew that, but now it's so much more immediate. Things like, we have a lot of possessions that we really don't need because we just haven't summoned the mental energy to let them go. Obvious if you can see our apartment, but a hundred times more real to me now that I have to deal with all of it, each t-shirt I don't want to give up, each gift my mom gave me that I don't know how to use, each letter that I meant to answer, each container that I meant to reuse and then forgot.

But as I go through the painful, time-consuming, much-dreaded process of culling our stuff and reconnecting with who I am as an individual, I am struck by the similarities with our national mood. We were all shocked by Katrina and the aftermath, I think (hence the eating each other). We were all looking for ways to make it better, whether by driving down there in a bus or giving some money or arguing with someone who wanted to blame the victims or writing an LTE. And I think a lot of us reached the same point where we realized that this was so big, so terrible, so everything-changing that the usual responses just weren't working, weren't equal to the magnitude of our grief.

And we're now, collectively, wondering where to put all that energy...and realizing that the only place for it to go is into the painful, time-consuming, much-dreaded process of reconnecting with ourselves as a country. Talking about racism, talking about global warming, talking about endemic poverty in our cities and small towns, talking about our budget as though it has a limit, talking about the costs and the benefits of that foreign adventure that maybe seemed so cheap and easy when it started. Taking stock of what we have and what we can afford to have. And it hurts, and it is frustrating because these are big problems that have been with us for a long time, and ignoring them has only made them worse, like that broken laptop I've let gather dust for a couple of years now. But it's the only way to rebuild and renew and reinvent ourselves as a more compassionate and more human society. And we owe it to ourselves to get it done, because a catastrophe like this one asks the big question: Who are we?