the eye of the storm

[moonatic_]

today my lj friend ketzl posted this entry.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/ketzl/150399.html?nc=6

in her replies to one comment she stated:
The way I see it, no one in power really understood what would happen when New Orleans flooded.i replied to her comment with

Comments

[ketzl]

Sending you many hugs & tears! I was SO glad to hear you're ok and safe with family. You, sstatus_quo and klfjoat... got one LJfriend in harm's way still unaccounted for :( dukexmachismo lives 60 miles east of NO and decided to ride it out. He's a self-described "wacko survivalist" but I think about him and worry.

I guess what I mean is, Bush knew, FEMA knew, you knew, everyone knew... on paper. But I get the sense that while people had intellectual knowledge, no one really grokked the vast scope of the problem. I fear that we still don't.

But living in a state of denial, that's kind of harsh to yourself I think. People live with risks-- people live in California on fault lines, people live in DC and NYC knowing they're in the bullseyes of terrorists, I live in semirural Georgia where some small part of the local Christian population would burn me at the stake for being Jewish or a Yankee or a pervert or just wealthier than them. They're all calculated risks. Sometimes we lose the bet... :( But if we thought about risks all the time we'd go through life with permanent paranoia or OCD or something.

Have you thought about long-term plans yet? Personally I can't imagine permanently living there considering the growing frequency of hurricanes and the rapid destruction of wetlands (I read the Chandeleur barrier islands were scoured and basically are gone now, for instance), but I'd love to visit.