Help For Hurricane Victims

Interrupting our day-to-day lives with some sobering reality:

If you can help the hurricane victims in Louisiana and Mississippi in any way, please do so. You can go to www.redcross.org and find out how you can help.

And prayers, lots of them, are needed. The entire region hit by Katrina is facing stupendous challenges to be habitable again, especially the New Orleans area. I don't know how they are going to rebuild that city, what with the levees having been breached and eighty percent of New Orleans under 15 feet of water.

My heart goes out to the people stranded there. There won't be food, electricity, basic necessities like clothes and toilet, for God knows how long. Having lived through four hurricanes in five weeks, with interruptions to electricity for days, I cannot even imagine that kind of misery added with flood waters. It surely makes all of us living by the coast to think hard about our happy and lazy seaside lives.

To my readers and their friends or families who might have been caught in Katrina's path these last few days: my heartfelt hope that everyone is safe and sound. You're all in my thoughts yesterday and today.

ADDENDUM:

I was watching the looters on TV. There was this man trying to push, with all his strength, a 42-inch television out of a store. It was simply amazing. Does the man not know that the streets are flooding? Where is he going to put that thing, assuming he has a vehicle to load it into? On the second storey of his flooded home? I can understand the mentality of looting for food and clothing, but a 42-inch TV? Does he not know there is NO ELECTRICITY? That New Orleans is a city that isn't going to be working for a long, long time? I'm just baffled at what this man was thinking at that moment, while he stood in the middle of the electronic department, surrounded by all the wonderful toys that men love.

Did some kind male gene kick in, the kind that ignored the reality of his situation, to overwhelm his survival instinct? Did he go "Arrgrrrrrowwl" like Tim the Toolman and thought, "I can have one of these! No, two! I'll take two!" I can just see a whole scene when he returns to his waiting wife/girlfriend and instead of giving her the needed food or toilet paper, he boasts, "Look what I got for us, honey, a 42-inch color TV!" And said wife/girlfriend replies, without batting an eyelit, "Oh good, maybe we can hook it up and watch the next episode of Desperate Housewife on our rooftop!"

I apologize. I didn't mean to make fun of the seriousness of the situation, but sometimes the ridiculous emphasizes the plain horror of the chaos surrounding the tragedy.

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