MindSpinner

I haven’t written about small things lately, or beautiful ones. So that’s my theme for this moment: small beautiful things. Here’s my list:

• A hand-woven basket
• Moss and thyme between the stones of the garden path
• My Aunt Linda’s pies, an hour’s labor of love always consumed by her family in one sitting
• The cat asleep at the foot of my bed in the morning
• The garden early when the morning glories open and there’s dew on roses
• The grape vine climbing the arbor, with new leaves after the beetles have gone.
• An unbidden greeting and a smile from a student
• A hug from one of my kids
• Email from a friend
• The next book I want to read, the weight of it, the scent of its pages
• A day to read
• Bare feet on soft grass
• Lying beneath a tree looking up through the leaves at the sky
• Riding downhill on a bicycle
• A good photograph
• My down comforter on a winter night

I’m long sick of the voices of those intent on sidestepping accountability and fogging issues. For a counterpoint, listen to This American Life this weekend (or next week via Real Audio). The broadcast is wisely dedicated to hearing the voices of New Orleans’ survivors. Their stories contain much that is beautiful and generous and noble, and much that is conversely utterly damning. There is so much to hear, to weigh, and to understand - far more than I can address today. I was touched (and convicted), for instance, by an account of how young men banded together to loot - in order to get baby formula and other essentials, and to distribute what they took to those in need - the young, the old, the helpless. That wasn’t looting. That was doing what our government should have been doing instead of defending bridges against hungry, thirsty, desperate people who wanted to walk out.

“God give me strength to face a fact though it slay me,” English biologist Thomas Huxley once said. The voices of New Orleans sound the substance of the human spirit; their echoes simultaneously trace the contours of hollow rhetoric and the fault lines of race, class, and poverty in this nation. We’ll have to be slain by the facts before we can change them.

I’m thinking of accountability. There’s “Brownie,” who has already been sacrificed, as if to make us think that will be enough. (No, it won’t.) But behind Brownie stands an administration that failed to prioritize the protection of its people, a fact manifested by the hiring of Brownie himself, by budget cuts affecting FEMA, by Bush’s tardy recognition of the magnitude of the crisis, even by the deployment of critical National Guard resources in Iraq, and furthermore by myriad other policy stances that protect wealth at great expense to the nation and especially to its poor, making poverty ever more certainly a bridge people cannot cross into opportunity and hope, even for rescue from a flood. And behind that administration stand those who empowered its priorities at the polls, though perhaps without fully understanding what would be stake. Behind the outcomes of elections also stand those of us who, despite all we apprehended, hadn’t fully found our voices and orchestrated them together to effect a different end. I am one of those voices. Perhaps that is why, in some measure, I feel accountable, too.

So New Orleans will stay with me always. It will remind me of why I have to exercise my voice, of why we all do, of why we have to hold our government and ourselves accountable, of why we have to hack our way through verbiage to get to truth, and through our own values to find which of them lead to justice and mercy and hope, and which of them, followed to their ends, lead to the systemic denial of all three, in the smaller tragedies of unrealized dreams or in the larger one of a city drowned and, for days, unaided.

I have walked away from this post at least four times this morning. I have other things to do - a long list. Others can speak more eloquently and knowledgeably than I can. But this is just not a time for silence, and I can tell this post isn’t going to leave me alone until it’s finished.

I read Anne Rice’s op-ed in the New York Times last night. Her sketch of the rich history and friendly culture of New Orleans helped me to grasp more clearly what we’ve lost in a now submerged city I visited once fifteen years ago.

Then I read her indictment of the nation with a new twist of pain:

“But to my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us. You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us ‘Sin City,’ and turned your backs.”

I understand Rice’s anger. Our government failed; that failure was not the will of the people. Many Americans citizens watched in horror as days passed and nothing was done. America willed its people saved, but we necessarily had to depend on an effective, responsive government, a government capable of forethought and timely action, to make that happen.

Some Americans who have more in common with the Pharisees of Jesus’ day than with Jesus himself made appalling remarks about God wiping out sin in New Orleans. If God is going to start wiping out sin, these sorts of people had better watch out, because the sin of extending judgment where compassion and the love of God are called for gets a lot of press in the New Testament. Intolerance separates people God loves from the love of God. It is un-Christlike. So are bigotry and callousness and racism, wherever they have found expression. We need to define all these emphatically as un-American, anti-democratic, and morally sullied.

I hope New Orleans won’t judge the heart of America by its incessantly outspoken modern-day Pharisees (who do not speak for God, no matter what authority they claim), just as I hope that America won’t judge the soul of New Orleans by the looters who have hampered operations there. Americans are opening their homes and their wallets to help. This morning I note that $7.7 million dollars has been given to the Red Cross through Amazon’s One-Click contribution system alone.

There will be jerks. Jerks we will always have with us. My sense of the matter is that concerned, caring Americans outnumber them.

Americans’ next act should be to hold our elected government accountable for man-made disasters here and abroad, for not taking care of all of our people. Smoke, fog, mirrors, and spin should not deter us. The test of our resolve will be whether we can remake American government as government by the people, of the people, and for the people - all the people. It’s not really just New Orleans we have to restore, it’s our nation’s ideals and their expression in policy and action. This is a time for us to clarify as a nation who we are and what we are about. If we can’t do that, and on genuinely compassionate and inclusive terms, then we know Anne Rice is right, and not just incredibly hurt, as we all are, by what has unfolded. Perhaps she is already right, and some of us are so heartbroken as to agree, but I can’t resign myself to that. Resigned people cannot accomplish what determined, mobilized people can.

Drilling down in the NY Times (online, of course), past the headlines, looking for something entirely different - for a breath of air, I found this delightful piece about Elaine Stritch, who is still singing and dancing atop a pair of magnificent legs at 80. She will perform a one-woman cabaret at the Carlyle hotel where she lives in a single, though luxurious, rented room. When I am an old woman, my legs won’t be any longer, and I’d rather live in a room with a patch of earth around it than in a hotel, but Elaine will definitely be among my inspirations.

Of living in a hotel in the city, she says, “When you’re getting on in years it’s wonderful. I think it’s the wrong way around to say when you get older move to the country. I think when you get older you move to New York. If you’re a nice broad they’ll look after you.”

Truth is, I’m sure being a nice broad will translate pretty well anywhere.

This Saturday morning I’m savoring just how good it feels to sleep until I’ve actually slept enough (7:30). Life seeps back into body and spirit. Genuine animation and energy will follow by tomorrow. No slogging through the day as an automaton operated by an overtired, misfiring brain. I can even go back to sleep if I want to, or take a nap in the afternoon.

That would be hard to do in the Astrodome.

Just before noon I have lunch, after the kids have gone to spend the day with their dad. Lean Cuisine - Beef Portobello I actually like - followed by the makings of one small chocolate chocolate chip cookie with nuts, in the form of frozen dough. (Everybody knows the dough is decadently delicious, actually better than the cookie.)

I think about how welcome a cookie would be if I were sitting on a cot at a refugee center.

Have you found that every aspect of everyday life this week is punctuated by connections to the suffering along the Gulf Coast? I look at my kids and see those families, and I tell my sixteen-year-old son, “I want a hug. You can do this. It won’t hurt you. That’s right, a real hug. Squeeze, please. See, that wasn’t so bad.” And there is a hug, not just limp submission.

I’m like a sponge sopped full of news, images, analysis and commentary this week. I cannot add usefully to the din but only make sense of it and resolve to help make the difference Americans can make in the way things are done - or not done - in this country. I wish that were a bigger difference. We ought to make it so.

Focus is not the order of the day, the experience of the week. There is waking up rested in a comfortable bed on a holiday weekend; there are people with no comfortable beds.

There is hugging your kid; there are people who do not know where family members are. There are mothers who watched their babies die. All the National Guard troops left on American soil cannot bring those babies back.

There is getting on with your life, your job, filling your gas tank at painful prices, and maintaining all your stuff, which takes a lot of your weekend; but there are also tens of thousands of people for whom “getting on with life” has been radically redefined as merely clinging to it, sans everything.

And there’s figuring out what you can do. That’s easier if you have money in the bank or something you can sell to get some.

At the school where I teach, grades 5-8 are competing with grades 9-12 to raise money for disaster relief. (The competition aspect of the drive seems at once utterly irrelevant and utterly predictable.) Thursday teachers urged students to give what they could. One girl from our high poverty community raised her hand and said, “What if you’re poor? What if you don’t have any money?” Good question, in fact one of the central questions Katrina has posed to America this week. Just how many ways does poverty spell disempowerment in this country? It’s time for an accounting. What justification can we offer as a nation for the hard fact that the rich are getting richer and the poor getting poorer, while the nation’s infrastructure decays, known vulnerabilities become foreseen disasters, and a city faces a crisis virtually unaided for days?