Days when you must ask "Why?"

New Orleans, Louisiana
September 1915
Death toll: 275

"This Category 4 storm caused Lake Pontchartrain to overflow its banks, killing 275 people. That scenario is one that hurricane experts don't like to ponder because if the city, surrounded on three sides by water, is hit by a major hurricane, the storm surge might inundate the city. "

ok.... so we KNEW that this could happen for 90 years now.

I study a lot of mysticism. I enjoy reading wisdom from Bhuddism and Hinduism. I read Celtic myths, as well as Greek. I read up on Haitian mysteries and what I can get my hands on about Voudon. I constantly seek out information on how others think and feel and believe. Not because i don't know how to do those things on my own. Not because i need to be pointed in a direction, or am incapable of making a decision like that on my own.... but because i find the more i read, the more i find the same truths in all the writing. as such, i have a cosmology. A belief system on how the Universe works, the existence of a creator(creatrix), and the nature of what it means to be human.

I like to believe in a Universe of abundance, and oneness. I like to believe in a generous and kindly higher power. I want to believe in the inherent goodness of it all.

But then something like Katrina happens.... and I question it all.This is one of those moments, i suppose, where you shake your fist at the sky and ask "why do bad things happen to good people?" (or some equally trite and rhetorical question)

I suppose my answer is that i shouldn't be going on CNN. But I’m so in love with that city, and I feel so helpless and there's this feeling that if i constantly check up on it, perhaps something good will happen.

Then i see a link, where i can click if i want to see video about the corpses piling up, with no ability to deal with them or, in many cases, identify them. I can't imagine wanting to watch that.

The other day in the cafe, i was sitting next to two guys who were reading the paper and chatting. One pointed out the story of the woman who placed her husband's dead body on a makeshift raft and took it with her when she began to swim for rescue.

The other guy responded with "Not to offend.... but clearly, they're stupid. They were told to get out. If they didn't, no wonder they died. Whatever. Can't save stupid people."

*picture yummyteece sitting shocked, mouth open* I'm sorry, asshole... WHAT!??!

If you read closely to that story, you will see that they were a poor family, and the man was on oxygen and too sick to move. Given the resources at their hands, they did what they thought was best. The wife was actually out of the house a short time, looking for extra food, when her husband died.

One can certainly argue that it is a "survival of the fittest" situation, but even with that, the appalling lack of respect for the fact that lives are lost is just... i don't have words to describe.

It does seem to me with the last couple of hurricane seasons, as well as the tsunami and major earthquakes, that Ma Nature is "thinning the herd" a bit here, and I understand the evolutionary need for that sort of thing.

But i look at all the death and destruction, and can't help but think.... "Is there something we are all supposed to learn from this? Is there a great global message? Is this the Earth's way of saying that 'the floggings will continue until the morale improves'??"

I don't know. I don't have answers. I can't even capture what I'm feeling. This is thinking out loud. No great "truths"..... just wonder, and confusion, and a touch of despair