Disasters like Hurricane Katrina bring out the best and worst in people. As emergency workers, police, soldiers, and medical staff work toil past the point of exhaustion to rescue and comfort the afflicted, others smash windows and raid businesses and cart off whatever they can carry. They’re like the seagulls in the movie Finding Nemo—their mantra is “Mine. Mine. Mine.” The devil’s own, looking for salvation in an electronic black box or a carton of pork rinds.

Angels hover in helicopters, maneuver in boats, and reach healing hands out wherever they can. I imagine the poor souls trapped on roofs or in attics in the stultifying Southern heat, avoiding drowning only to die of heatstroke. Water, water, everywhere and not a drop to drink. Bodies floating and bloating amid the destruction, faceless, nameless, but not unloved. Somewhere in the post-Apocalyptic world that is New Orleans and Mississippi , someone is calling their names, heaving sobs, sighs, and prayers to heaven as hopes sink and the black waters continue to rise.

The Big Easy has become the Big Horror, flashing over a giant screen like a nightmarish scene in a horror movie. Day breaks and hearts are broken. Night falls on dark spirits. Crime rises to the surface of the floodwaters like a grimy oil. The soulless point and shoot guns and kill those who haven’t died already. But even the survivors have lost their lives in a palpable sense—all that they’ve known is gone, swept away in wind and fury and raging water. Life will go on but where will it go? Many must feel they’re already in Hell.

August 31, 2005