A Different America

Posted on September 5, 2005 in Disasters Reflections

All I want is to be where I am at. The news — other blogs — immerse me in a lake of dire information, horrid tales out of the flood following the hurricane. As I move about the submetropolis that is Orange County, brown hills surround arroyos filled with sand and gravel. How strange to be hearing of too much water in this dessicated season.

Few people prowled the streets here. I suspect they went to Palm Springs like my unfortunately-named friend Katrina or farther still — to the Colorado River where they pumped their jet skis full of three dollar a gallon gas and zoomed about the waters which were filtered to a brilliant blue by a series of three or more dams. We went out with Leah for lunch at a Hawaiian restaurant, one of a threesome in Rancho Santa Margarita. To us, it was interesting — it got us all out of the house for some necessary socializing — but how did our actions affect the conditions of the world?

I suppose you could jump from the shredded pork on Leah’s plate or the eggs in Lynn’s bowl or the chicken cutlets that I dipped in Worceshire Sauce to farms and then to what the animals ate and the farms where that food was grown and to the fertilizer, etc. until the world whirled in a sauce dipping bowl. At least one molecule could be traced to New Orleans: but there’s no point to that. All we can do here is see the tracings of human forms amid the erasing waters and think “That is a human being like me” as the correspondents recite the old shibboleths parcelled out by the White House, relying not on their common sense but on authority built upon falsehood.

I want to be somewhere else. Not in New Orleans or a fantasy kingdom, but in a different America.