A Wasted Year

It is now the first day of August, a month that I have never liked because that's when the southern heat is at it's worst. "Dog Days" as we call them. For me,the heat was always bearable as I knew that September was forthcoming and cool,if not cold days, would soon begin. There is no other place I would rather be in the winter months. Now...I have lost much of my happy anticipation for just about everything I once enjoyed after wasting an entire year of my life. A year of seeing nothing but destruction, very little progress and hearing all the rhetoric in the news about how well we are doing. A resilient people right? I used to be. I used to be a lot of things. I used to be a happy person, a very spirited lady but somehow Katrina is slowly squeezing the life out of me. In past years,I would begin Christmas shopping by mid August as I was convinced I was Mrs. Claus. I always had the tree decorated at Thanksgiving so we could look at the beauty of it while enjoying the meal I had prepared. Since the storm so much of that kind of celebration has passed us by.Last Christmas the daughter and her family were sick with flu like symptoms and a cough but there was a decorated tree for the children,the damage in the room was cleverly concealed by my daughter. They, me too, all had the cough for many months after the storm but the doctors "debunked" the notion that all the contaminants we had come in contact with was the cause. So many people had it that it became known as the "Katrina Cough".

We have been living in isolation for this period of time and never really knew what was going on in the other areas. Because of the enormous amount of videos that are out.... now we know. In our darkest hours, we had desperately needed supplies turned away from us. Why? A person without food can live longer than one without water. We have seen national guardsmen that were given orders to shoot another American if they didn't get out of their damaged houses in New Orleans. If this had happened to you, wouldn't you be frightened as we are? Mississippi's National Guard (40%) was deployed to Iraq shortly before Katrina. It was the biggest deployment in the State's history. They weren't here to get ice and water to us.I suppose it was an unfortunate coincidence.

Enormous amounts of debris has been picked up making the desolation at least a little cleaner.There are still homes with blue tarp on the roofs. There are many locally owned businesses that have given no sign that they will rebuild. Many streets in neighborhoods are showing signs of future collapse. Utilities are passing their losses to us in the way of estimation not actual usage.To live without a vision for a better future is not living at all. It is merely existing. .