Fellow Humans

The images are awful, the stories beyond anything the word “tragic” can adequately express. The anger over inaction – the worst aspects of Bureaucracy rearing its ugly head at precisely the time we needed its best. There is fault to be had at every level, from the highest levels of federal government down to the lowest. Mayor Nagin seems the only one man enough to admit his part, “I should have screamed louder. I should have screamed louder.” The president certainly will not admit to gross ineptitude and a grievous error in judgment in thinking of FEMA as a figurehead branch of government that didn’t actually need people qualified to run it.

Our nations invisible - those living in poverty – those forgotten people that many of us walk by or ignore, either because we feel guilty or because we simply choose to not see that sort of thing – are loudly on display for us all to see, to acknowledge, to recognize their humanity and say to ourselves – do we have what it takes to persevere when literally everything has been stripped of us – everything including our dignity? Can we handle it? If faced with it, will we show our best side? Or our worst?

There are going to be a lot of parents who have lost their children – I can’t imagine anything more horrible than that. There are going to be a lot of children who will no longer have parents or guardians – these children will need people willing to step up to the plate and adopt them. They deserve no less chance at a decent and loving upbringing – in fact they will need it even more. They will need protection from predators. As the African proverb says, It takes a village to raise a child” and the U.S. needs to be that village.

There are therapists from all over the states who are taking special training courses right now to go to these people and attempt to help them through this time. I hope there are therapists for these therapists when they are through at the end of each day. I hope there are people willing to dry the tears of the policemen and firefighters who have lost everything along with everyone else, but who are still showing up to do what they do best. Some didn’t make it.

There’s a lot of work ahead. As a friend said today, they need supplies, they need money, they need professionals there to guide them through these changes, and they also need our willingness to let go of anything within ourselves that puts us against our fellow human beings. It’s only with a collective shedding of the holding on to whatever puts our mind against other people that will accomplish world peace. We haven’t done very well with that and we can do better.

There’s a supply drive at a place where I work out. It’s a great community of people – when a woman with no insurance lost her arm in a car accident – this group of people came forward, pitched in, and paid for her prosthetic. Those are the kind of people I want to stick around. And they’ve come through again, with stacks of boxes of supplies, clothing, dufflebags and sleeping bags to be shipped. I didn’t know what to contribute and started thinking about what I would want if I was in that situation – all I could think of was, new underwear. I don’t know why. It’s stupid, I’m sure, but I went and filled up the cart with multi-packs of every size I could find – male, female, boys and girls . . .

Let’s start thinking like a village. What can we do to clean up this mess we’ve made of ourselves as human beings? If any one of us has ever had a negative thought in our head toward another person, then we are part of that mess. It’s fine for those people who believe that its every man for himself – that everyone should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps. But its kind of hard to do if you have no boots. We can do better. We've got to.

Peace.