One of the Many Reasons

Actually, it's one of the three or four that I'm not talking about Hurricane Katrina laying, let's face it, Biblical hand-of-God type waste to the Gulf Coast, a whole lot of my time is that I just can't, physically.

I was in tears Friday morning, in Boston, on my public transit -- which runs through a major Amtrak hub, and thus connects me to the rest of the country even though I don't have a car, and which, if I needed to, I could whip out the Amex card and buy a ticket on, or rent a car with, because though I am currently impoverished by choice to go to law school, I'm not actually "poor", I have credit if I need it, that magic thing that gives me credibility -- reading a free newspaper talking about these poor people, these poor-in-every-sense-people, these tragic people who are poor, who were being left to die by our own government because they couldn't afford to get themselves out, who have no food -- and I had breakfast yesterday morning -- and no water -- and I was carrying a bottle full of cold Brita-filtered water yesterday morning with me on the T -- and no medicine -- and I am healthy and strong -- these poor people who have no sanitation -- and I showered that morning, I washed and conditioned my hair -- and they are dying.

And I was in tears because that moment when a living, breathing, conscious, desiring to live human being becomes nothing more than a piece of meat that would now start rotting is one I have carried with me constantly since I learned my father was found in his apartment dead in Anchorage, Alaska, on July 13th of this year.

I make up stories. Not for a living. Not yet. But I carry that writer's imagination around with me every day, and Hurrican Katrina stops me in my tracks, on the sidewalk, in the sunlight, here in Boston, where my stomach curls into a ball and I feel like I'm going to fall down and it is stupid pride that keeps me on my feet, so others won't know that I just had a moment of shaking terror that I was there, that I was there and drowning, there and dying, viscerally there and smelling dead bodies, and surrounded by water getting more toxic by the day, and crying exhaustedly because there is nothing to do, there is nothing to do, and no one is coming for me. That I would do no different than these poor people, who trusted their government to help them in time of disaster, to rescue them, because that's what it's for, the welfare of the people, and had that trust betrayed, vilely.

There but for the grace of God, there but for the stroke of sheer, blind, uncaring luck, go you and go me. May at least one person reading this realize it, deep into the marrow: we are not any better than those dying right now. We would die too, it's just not our city that's devastated. This time.

No one is better because they have money.