(no subject)
I'm not sure how I did it; really, I'm not. But I managed to make it through the events of this past week or so without really letting it sink in, without letting it register. On 9/11, it was easy to get a grasp on the toll, on the pain this was causing, on the desperate situation, because there was a fire and a collapse. Sudden, quick emergency situations. The water was different. It was slow, and we didn't -see- people drowning in it. If you wanted to, and, God help me, I did, it was easy to look at CNN and choose to view it in slices. There were corpses shown, yes, but not how they died. There were people in agony, but we didn't watch them die like we watched people leap to their deaths from the top of the Towers. You could parse it out, seperate the events, and take away their impact. I did.
And then I read this:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/09/katrina.survivors/index.html
Go ahead. Read about a family trapped in their attic, with their dead grandmother, and the sixteen year old daughter who had to plead with her mother to keep her from taking a handful of anti-depressants and ending her suffering. Let that article put it all together for you.
I wish I hadn't, but I'm still glad I did.
And then I read this:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/09/katrina.survivors/index.html
Go ahead. Read about a family trapped in their attic, with their dead grandmother, and the sixteen year old daughter who had to plead with her mother to keep her from taking a handful of anti-depressants and ending her suffering. Let that article put it all together for you.
I wish I hadn't, but I'm still glad I did.