9.05.2005

Do I watch too much CNN or not enough?

Last Saturday Mat had it on all day. Sunday too. A huge hurricane coming towards New Orleans. Everyone out. This is the storm that we have all been fearing. This is serious. I went to bed wondering if New Orleans would be gone when I woke up on Monday morning.

I got up early, and Mat was already up. Already watching. Is New Orleans gone? It wasn't as bad as they thought it was going to be. I made some comment about sensational cable news, something like "I knew they were just trying to make everyone scared". They exaggerated so that we would keep watching. But then I did keep watching, and the levee broke and it all turned really bad really fast. I didn't realize the gravity of what I was watching until one of the reporters broke down in tears describing riding in a boat through the neighborhoods of New Orleans and hearing people knocking and screaming from their attics as the night grew pitch darker. All of a sudden, I looked at Aaron Brown, and I truly internalized what was happening at that very moment over in New Orleans. It chilled me, and I couldn't turn off the television because even if you turned it off, the people suffering right that instant did not leave.

When I turn it off I feel like I have abandoned my post; I have left those people out there all alone without thinking about them, without knowing that they exist, knowing that they are alive and that they are wondering how much longer they will be. Sensing that they are out there brings me paralyzing unrest and despair. I scream. I cry and call my congresswomen and email the White House. Towards the end of a long, sustained day of coverage and time spent in the Situation Room, pictures of chaos and hellish suffering, my soul feels like moths fluttering around inside of my body.

All of it is so gruesome. So terrifying. It takes all of the worst nightmares that you could ever imagine and rolls them all into an endlessly spiraling black hole. All of it is terrible. Being trapped in your attic. Slowly losing breathing room. Knocking and screaming and hearing helicopters flying overhead, knowing that they can't hear you Letting go of your husband's hand when you can't hold on any longer, when it's no longer physically possible and losing him forever.

Being trapped in a house full of water with a diabetic father who has no more insulin. Drinking the last sip of water left in your sinking house in the 98 degree daytime. A house full of children wandering about with their dead mother lying on her bed in the back room, her oxygen tank depleted. Alligators in the water, dying dogs tangled in electrical wires, is this real?

Being plucked from your roof and taken to the Convention Center, being told to wait there for a bus to come and get you and take you away and finding dark rooms full of feces and dead bodies and no water and no food. No respite from the heat and all the while helicopters flying overhead as the sun goes down and you wait in the dark to see if it is you who will be raped at gunpoint tonight. No one in charge. Screaming crowd. Dying babies with sunken eyes and old people seizing on the ground.

Am I watching too much TV? Can one watch too much TV at this point when there are people living through these horrors? I have to know. I have to feel it. I have to see it, because in some way that makes me feel like I am there with them.

I see you. I know what is happening to you. Someone knows. We all know. We see. We are with you.

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