By Charlotte K. Jarmy
One tired reporter in New Orleans sighs, “There are no words to tell you…” Oh, yes, there are. Thousands of words pounding against your mind, your heart and your gut. Among them are: New Orleans; disaster; Holocaust; refugee; body count; broken levees; polluted water; starving people; help me … and on and on and on! I hang in there like everyone else, drenched in sorrow, unable to sleep well, fascinated by the outpouring of words and images from the bowels of hell.
News comes from New Orleans describing it as a ghost city, and the oracles of doom start predicting the number of dead. What is there in us that compels us to view drastic events with almost devilish fascination? We sat through the O.J. trial with the ability to recount each day’s details to our near and dear, as well as to the stranger in line at the supermarket. The recent media floods the airwaves or the paper world with news of the comatose woman, the Laci Peterson case, and finally the messy embarrassment of the Michael Jackson case. Deep down in our own watery essence is the guilty thought, “Thank God it’s not us.”
The sorrow is real, the need to help is also real. From all corners of the world come offers of aid: money in billions, children rushing to empty their piggy banks, and a surge of sympathy that gives us hope once more for mankind’s goodness. All of that is true and sincere, but underneath there may be an attempt to stand out from the crowd and have others say, “Wow, well done, how effective.” Do I sound as cynical as I feel? Yes, because all through my own “outpouring” of words, I tried mightily to use as many as I could that would resonate with the horrific flood itself. Mea culpa. I am human.
I look back into my recent book that covered events over more than 10 years of dramatic episodes that are now relegated to history or to the microfiche in a library’s records of our lives. I can tick them off: Oklahoma City, the burning of black churches, the cult group that committed suicide to coincide with the “heavenly” comet, the intifada in the Middle East, the Florida voting fiasco, and of course, Sept. 11, 2001. I remember my own philosophy that opened my book of columns: “I see the past as a part of our present; it walks with us to light the way.”
Hurricane Katrina remains uppermost because modern technology has imprinted the power of nature onto our minds. We move on uncomfortably with the subject of, “Who’s to blame?” Politics becomes the whipping boy of this American Tragedy. We make the switch to finger-pointing partly to squeeze some relief from all the sorrow and also to protect us from the future. This hurricane season is not over. When will the words New Orleans be relegated to the back pages of our newspapers? We know that what grabs the public is the fresh news of each day.
Iraq must be our focus once again. The estimated lives lost are not quite 2,000. But we cannot yet place that number against the loss expected from the Katrina debacle, also of American lives. Numbers show up as well in polls that mark the decline of the president’s popularity. The longer the war lasts, the more we’ll see the relationship between the list of war casualties and the growing anger and concern that the polls point to.
What will save us will be good news. Say, like headlines that sing out, “New Orleans is dry again” and “thousands of children from the devastated states are back in school.” I’ll leave you with the quotation from the biblical lesson, “It’s not up to us to finish the work, but we are not free to walk away from it (Pirke Avot 2:15).” It’s amazing how we turn to the wisdom of the ancients when we need direction and hope.
