Shaken

I've been avoiding the news. After being exposed to it all day on Wednesday, I've pretty much stuck to the updates and what I get from friends and family, all of who are feeling their helplessness. Tonight I picked up a paper at Panera and read.

I read things that moved me to tears. People dying in shelters from Day One (what kind of existence did they have, to have been living 24 hours from death?). Learning that Florida schools are enrolling newly-homeless children. Victims arriving in Houston being designated "domestic refugees". Rescue workers being shot at. Pain, fear, anger I understand; but what motivates a person to fire on the very help he awaits before it has a chance to reach him? To rape and beat fellow disaster victims?

Things that angered me. Wounds, wounds; one man saying that it felt like the government was punishing the people of New Orleans. A university professor who thinks the government should have ordered a mandatory evacuation on Thursday--when the storm was still in South Florida, and who knew that it would survive crossing the peninsula and strengthen, much less where it was going to hit? The government is not God; neither is it the devil. And hindsight is always 20/20.

I'm so distressed. Last year when Florida was ravaged by four storms, I witnessed the best in people, peppered with some of the worst. Now all I see is the worst, and it's shaking me.

Gas, incidentally, is up to $3.11 (from $2.99 yesterday and $2.48 the day before). But with all that's happening, if that's the worst effect we feel locally, then I have nothing to complain about.