Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina Goes On

Without people, our country is nothing. But Republicans in Washington only care about winning and oh yes money for themselves and their cronies. I wonder when the people who dominate Washington will start caring about what's happening to our country again?

Here's a searing story from the Times-Picayune of New Orleans about the hammering effect of Hurricane Katrina and the hollow response of Washington and the numbing effect of walking through a permanent disaster area month after month:

My hands shook. I had to look down when I walked down the steps, holding the banister to keep steady. I was at risk every time I got behind the wheel of a car; I couldn't pay attention.

I lost 15 pounds and it's safe to say I didn't have a lot to give. I stopped talking to Kelly, my wife. She loathed me, my silences, my distance, my inertia.

I stopped walking my dog, so she hated me, too. The grass and weeds in my yard just grew and grew.

I stopped talking to my family and my friends. I stopped answering phone calls and e-mails. I maintained limited communication with my editors to keep my job but I started missing deadlines anyway.

My editors, they were kind. They cut me slack. There's a lot of slack being cut in this town now. A lot of legroom, empathy and forgiveness.

I tried to keep an open line of communication with my kids to keep my sanity, but it was still slipping away. My two oldest, 7 and 5, began asking: "What are you looking at, Daddy?"

The thousand-yard stare. I couldn't shake it. Boring holes into the house behind my back yard. Daddy is a zombie. That was my movie: Night of the Living Dead. Followed by Morning of the Living Dead, followed by Afternoon . . .

. . . . . . .

My own darkness first became visible last fall. As the days of covering the Aftermath turned into weeks which turned into months, I began taking long walks, miles and miles, late at night, one arm pinned to my side, the other waving in stride. I became one of those guys you see coming down the street and you cross over to get out of the way.

I had crying jags and fetal positionings and other "episodes." One day last fall, while the city was still mostly abandoned, I passed out on the job, fell face first into a tree, snapped my glasses in half, gouged a hole in my forehead and lay unconscious on the side of the road for an entire afternoon.

You might think that would have been a wake-up call, but it wasn't. Instead, like everything else happening to me, I wrote a column about it, trying to make it all sound so funny.

It probably didn't help that my wife and kids spent the last four months of 2005 at my parents' home in Maryland. Until Christmas I worked, and lived, completely alone.

Even when my family finally returned, I spent the next several months driving endlessly through bombed-out neighborhoods. I met legions of people who appeared to be dying from sadness, and I wrote about them.

I was receiving thousands of e-mails in reaction to my stories in the paper, and most of them were more accounts of death, destruction and despondency by people from around south Louisiana. I am pretty sure I possess the largest archive of personal Katrina stories, little histories that would break your heart.

I guess they broke mine.

Disasters are real. The president and his friends tried to turn it into a cartoon. Karl Rove tried to turn it into a photo op to prop up Bush's numbers when it was New Orleans that needed propping up. The media got stuck on endless loops of looting rather than the tragic situation that existed in New Orleans and elsewhere along the gulf. Congress shed a few tears, voted some money and immediately Republicans were trying to figure out how to make money and special deals on the misery.

It's time to admit it. We're a broken country. Until they clean up their act, the Republicans aren't going to have any answers. Maybe the Democrats don't have all the answers either but until the Republicans return to some level of decency, it's time to give the Democrats a chance.