Recommends needed, please, for our traditional Saturday community diary
I'm not even there, and this storm has worked me over. I spent much of the day today listening to internet feeds of emergency radio in New Orleans, Houston, and San Antonio, listening to the people finally evacuating the victims, finally giving food and water, finally giving clothes, finally taking people to hospitals, finally providing ways to locate loved ones. Finally offering toilets and showers!
Five days after the storm hit New Orleans.
My boyfriend went for a bike ride with a friend today. It was a beautiful day and they looped around his friend's neighborhood, beside Warner Park and beautiful Lake Mendota. When he came home I told him about my difficult day of listening to the rescue of the people of New Orleans.
"I have no sympathy for them," he said, "if they chose not to leave."
"I can't believe you feel that way. The bus service, train and air service all stopped the day before the evacuation became mandatory!" I told him. "There was no effort to help the people get out. And then FEMA declined to provide water, food and other aid to these hundred thousand or more survivors, and even refused to allow the Red Cross or anyone else to do so, they claimed because it might lead people not to want to leave. Hundreds, maybe thousands more died because of that choice."
"What do you expect them to have done?" he snapped. "It's easy for you to second-guess, but it takes time."
"You don't understand," I said. "The supplies and help were at hand, and they chose not to bring in aid and not to expeditiously evacuate people."
"The people were out of control. How could they go in when they were afraid of the armed gangs and mobs?"
I could hardly believe what I was hearing from him--he's a liberal--and I got mad. "These are professionals. These are National Guard and other military. They come, many of them, in Humvees and military helicopters, Blackhawks even. They have guns. That's who I have spent all day listening to! Military! And they can't go into any danger to save thousands and thousands of lives?"
"I don't need you attacking me."
"You don't understand yet what has happened. And this has affected me a great deal..."
"If only you were as affected and moved to fix your own situation! To get a job, to do anything at all!" That stung me to silence. He left the room, and I didn't reply after him.
My boyfriend and I almost never fight. Come to think of it, the last time I'd been so angry with him might have been when I'd tried to tell him just how wrongheaded and baseless and doomed the impending Iraq war was, and he was almost as dismissive and sharp toward me. He didn't know yet, and he doesn't know yet now.
I decided something yesterday that I haven't told him, haven't told my parents, but I'll tell you. Seeing the destruction of an entire city, the evacuation of refugees onto buses they know not even where to, it burnt away some cottony layer of self-protection inside me. I was able to contemplate moving back to my parents in San Antonio.
I had a very, very painful childhood and young adulthood. I always hated San Antonio itself anyway, and I have wanted never to return to the awful pain of that past. I fled here to Madison, Wisconsin five years ago--attracted not least by its progressivism--and except financially, I have flourished here. And even though my relationship with my boyfriend is gradually but apparently inexorably coming to an end, even though I have disabilities that make it chronically very difficult to hold down a job, and even though I have no other resources and no other place to go, till yesterday I couldn't contemplate going back to my parents.
My mom wants me back there so badly. Our relationship has been pretty bad, but improved a fair amount in the last couple years, and we do love each other. Ever since I've left she's made me uncomfortable with her tearful pleas to have me closer, of how much she misses me. And in my pain, I never knew what to say because I could not stand the thought of going back. When suddenly I felt differently yesterday, it felt frightening, but it felt free.
What if I go back? My mom is now the librarian at the middle school where I spent the worst three years of my life. When she and I stopped by there briefly a few weeks before I moved to Madison, I was shaking, teary, desperate: I have PTSD from the devastating bullying experiences I had there, and many years later I was (and am) far from past it. But what if I go back, and what if, even if I don't have a regular job, I am brave enough to volunteer in her library? What if I can help make a place that was a terrible hurricane to me a little better for other children? They are me--can I go back and save myself? I don't know, but I would like it if I could.
My boyfriend just went out the front door... "Bye, see you later on." He's going to Barnes and Noble, to sit in the cafe and draw in his sketchbook. We were going to go together, but he's still angry and doesn't want me with him now. I really try not to be bitter.
Mostly I'm sad and pained. I love him enough to care too much when he falters in caring for the hurricane victims, or for me. He wants me to leave, and my mom wants me to come home... maybe if I'm very brave I can listen to them.
I'm not those people who are being evacuated, I'm those people years from now, their old homes rebuilt but lives utterly different, teetering on the edge of whether or not they can bear to go home to where they were poor and marginalized, and where a biblical disaster befell them before they escaped with only the filthy clothes on their backs.
Will they be able to go back? Will I?
That's my effing problem of the moment. What's yours?
And won't you help share the joy of WYFP with others by recommending? The diaries are flying by at such a prodigious rate that unless you recommend, WYFP will be off the recent diaries list a little to quickly.