My Own Weakness
In the last two days I've decided I have the strength to read the Internet headlines about Katrina, and I've even clicked on two of the more hopeful sounding ones. One was about Snowball (potentially?) being found and one was about a 6-year-old boy leading five toddlers and an infant to safety. In both cases I ended up sobbing because apparently there isn't a single story out of New Orleans that isn't also crammed full of one kind of horror or another. I'm just not equipped to deal with any of it. Not the racism that is apparent everywhere. Not the classism. Not the decisions about who lives and who dies. Not the stories of separated families, abandoned elderly people, emaciated babies. Not the mental images of cats and dogs swimming, or drowning, in metal crates as the water rose or being consciously abandoned by humans who somehow think their lives are of lesser value. I'm only good in a crisis if I'm in the crisis. In this case, the crisis is in me.