Thoughts and prayers.  What’s for dinner?

I’m getting really tired of living through historical events. This is two hurricanes of “Biblical” proportions in my lifetime (although I can count the number of strong storms I’ve seen on both hands and still need more fingers). I’ve been through a bomb scare where they found the device. I’ve been overseas during one coup and in my own country during an attempted one. I’ve had friends die during a world wide pandemic. I’ve seen the towers fall. I’ve watched two shuttles explode and I’ve seen the wall come crumbling down.

I lived through Hurricane Andrew. Parts of South Florida (like Miami Lakes) were blown off the map. The National Hurricane Center in Homestead, FL was DESTROYED. And yes, we WERE prepared. We expected them every year, and it still devastated communities. Hundreds were dead, thousands were homeless. But there were a couple of key differences. One – Andrew, while super-powerful was very compact. It slammed into southern Dade County, while I was just 50 miles north and only lost power and a tree. Two – South Florida is FLAT. The highest points are condominiums and landfills. There are no mountains or hills, so no landslides. No dams breaking. Just dealing with a storm surge and then the tide takes it out (eventually)

Helene is, IMHO, so much worse. The flooding, the mudslides, the destruction of infrastructure. I-40 will take a year to rebuild. Some small towns will never come back. Lives are shattered. Businesses destroyed. There are likely loved ones, possibly whole families trapped under feet of mountainside and mud who will never be recovered.

And so I sit here. I react with numbness at this point, and sadness, and frankly a bit of gallows humor. I’m dealing with my own life and my own crises. I’ve got the Boone Comic Con that I’m trying to reschedule, a vacation that I need to prep for, damage to the house,  bills, and life in general. I don’t have time for this.  I just want to not think about it.  I want to treat it just like we all do when we hear about this kind of devastation in Haiti or South America or other parts of the world when they get pummeled by storms or earthquakes or other disasters.

“It’s 6 pm. Thoughts and prayers.  What’s for dinner”

Funny, I can’t do that now. Not when I know people who have lost so much.

Maybe, I shouldn’t have done that in the past either.  Maybe I shouldn’t do that in the future either. It shouldn’t matter if I know anyone involved. That’s human decency.

The news cycle is going to just roll on in a couple of days. CNN, NPR, and the NBC Nightly news will go back to focusing on the election, the latest strike, something else Elon Musk did, and whatever the scandal du jour is. Just like the latest mass shooting, this will be put to the back of America’s collective consciousness and Appalachia will be forgotten again, or worse, another punch line to somebody’s bad joke.

“Oh, poor baby…”

I’m not writing any of this to garner sympathy for me. Hell, I’ve got it easy compared to so many others right now. If anything, maybe this is all an expression of survivors guilt. I don’t know. What I do know is that at this point, I should have some sort of conclusion.  I should be offering a solution, maybe with a chart offering up a 3-step plan to fix this. I can’t. I’ve got nothing. There’s no thinking sideways to come up with a solution to get out of this jam.

I can’t fix things for the hundreds of thousands of people affected in my own backyard, I can barely help myself. I can just do what I always do: I put one foot in front of the other and I keep moving forward. I take it one step at a time, One day at a time, sometimes, one hour at a time. Sometimes, just one moment at a time. And I can’t tell anyone else to do that, I just need to do that myself.