Too Many People Have Died
by ChrisSeptember 9th, 2005 7:50 pm
… The image — of a man frantically trying to breath through a pipe stuck in a ventilator grate as the waters rise over his head — is too searing to hold at an emotional distance. How long did he survive, submerged in total darkness? And how many others died in the same bizarre trap — too weak or terrified to break through the layers of plywood and asphalt that had suddenly become the lids on their underwater coffins?
Thinking about those deaths is like looking at pictures of people jumping, hand in hand, from the windows of the World Trade Center on 9/11 — forced in a moment of howling panic to choose between the flames and the long fall to the pavement below. Such images are unendurable. The mind recoils from them as if we ourselves were caught in the same trap.
And suddenly all the backbiting over who failed first — or most often, or most spectacularly — seems too vile to worry about, much less write about. Even the big, important questions — the future of New Orleans, the threat of global warming, the paralyzing problems of race and poverty in America — have lost their intellectual appeal. Too many people have died, and too much has been destroyed to try to make sense of it now. And as stupid and obnoxious and insane as the powers that be have been this past week, they don’t seem very funny now — not even Dick Cheney.
