This is no 9/11. This might be worse …
Within hours of the 9/11 attack, our country was banding together and the president was leading us in our resolve. Not so tonight ...
Rescuers are being shot at by the people they're attempting to help. People are literally dying on the streets. …and worse yet, no one seems to have -- or at least be talking publicly about it -- a serious, legitimate plan to help.
It appears more out of hand now and most of the people with any ability to do do anything about it appear baffled and unwilling…
It will take years to recover from this ...
I can’t remember being this glued to the wire services and the television news since my college days of covering the 9/11 terrorist attack. And I was much more involved then, as the editor of my college paper. Now I’m just a measly features reporter in an upper Midwest state where we have no idea the devastation a hurricane can ravage …
And I feel helpless. I'm perhaps more misunderstood because I’m unlike the majority of the victims submerged in this tragedy. I'm well educated. I'm by no means 'well-off' but I have a good job and I’m blessed with a home -- not the nicest, best home on the block -- but a home I can call my own, full of a lifetime’s worth of sports memorabilia, music albums and photos galore ...
Hundreds of thousands of people in New Orleans and Mississippi can’t say that right now. Even after dozens of images and talking heads scrawling across the TV screen today, the most humbling statement came from the mayor of San Antonio as he announced officials would be opening that city and the AlamoDome for evacuees as well, saying “Think about this for a minute -- All those people that had jobs -- they don’t have them anymore. They’ve lost all of their possessions. They’ve lost their homes.”
Yet I find my self worrying about how we'll get through this ...
I filled my car’s gas tank yesterday morning. Five years ago it cost me about $10 to fill up the tank in my little Toyota Camry. Yesteday, with my little Dodge Neon it cost me more than $21 to fill up half its tank. By then gas was at $2.99 a gallon. By the time Kates drove home from school in the afternoon, it was up to $3.19.
… and then I wonder has the state of our country ever been worse?
How would I know -- I’ve only been living in it for the last 26 years. Yet I can’t help wonder. Now under the same president who stood so tall during the last American crisis, we’re trying to fight a war in Iraq that we started for no apparent reason and there’s no end in sight. The economic gap between the classes only seems to get larger. We’re practically rationing food to pay for our gas. And now Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath are tearing up the Gulf Coast and having an impact on this country that may take years to realize …
All this confronting me tonight as I type on my personal computer, in my own home, watching my flat screen TV, and prepare to sleep in my own bed, all while I'm comforted by the fact I will go to work tomorrow and come home with a paycheck.
What a crazy, selfish world we live in ….
Today's stories & coverage:
--Chaos erupts amid New Orleans’ desperation
--Aerial views
--NBC photojournalist describes horrific situation in New Orleans
--As it informs, TV also irks
--'And now we are in hell'
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