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Our long national nightmare is just beginning
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by Helen & Harry Highwater, Unknown News
Sept. 23, 2005
In what passes for reality, we're dirt poor and living in Wisconsin, but in my nightmare we're dirt poor and living in New Orleans.
We have no car, no funds for a hotel, but the radio says a huge hurricane
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is bearing down on us. We scrounge through the coins and dollar bills, our grocery money, our piggy bank, whatever we've got, hoping we have enough for a Greyhound ticket out of town. But it doesn't matter -- Greyhound and Amtrak have suspended service, shuttered their terminals. There's no way out of town, as the winds whip and peel the siding off the building we call home.
The storm shakes the walls, terrifies the cat, shatters windows but mercifully leaves the roof intact. After hours of noise so loud I can't hear myself scream, eventually the storm fades, and I let myself have a little optimism. We kiss, and we tell each other we've made it through. Another kiss, but then we hear a different rumble and roar, a sound we've never heard before, but we both know what it is -- water over the levee.
A few minutes later, Lake Pontchartrain comes up our street, over the curb, up our steps, into our home. An hour later we're swimming on the second floor, and Helen asks if I know where the hacksaw and hammer are. She has some crazy idea about knocking a hole in the ceiling before we drown.
Well, the tools are usually in the bottom drawer in the kitchen, so I swim away, and I'm underwater for far too long, desperate to breathe, desperate. But I'm able to swim down the stairs, find the tools, and swim back up, coughing out brownwater when I finally come up from under. There's only a few feet between my nose and the ceiling, and the water comes up the wall. We both hang on to a window sill for leverage, and together we brutalize the ceiling, wham, wham. Our hands are bloody by the time the plaster is knocked away to the flimsy wood underneath, and finally with one more hammersmash there's a hole to the daylight above. We crawl out onto the shingles, and we'll be OK as long as the water doesn't top the roof.
We wait, shivering in the hot sunlight and sweating through the muggy night, and wonder -- where are the rescuers? We wait, we wait, and the evening and the morning are the first day. Overnight I have to go to the bathroom, but the world that had bathrooms in it is ten feet underwater, and the roof slopes too steeply to squat without losing my balance. So I fill my pants, and scoop out my own dung with my fingers. I weep, I'm hungry, I'm nauseous, I vomit, and I wonder when we'll be rescued.
Is anyone coming? Does anyone care? I'm so thirsty, but the water lapping at our feet is so foul, so smelly. And the evening and the morning is the second day.
I wake up holding my Helen's hand, squeezing her fingers, waking her to the sound of an outboard engine. But it's not a little boat with a loud engine sputtering down our street to save us. It's not our rescue from the hell of New Orleans, it's just the sound of my neighbor's VW, back here in Wisconsin.
It's all been a dream, again that nightmare, but we're not in New Orleans, not on the roof. We're in our bed, relatively safe and secure. There's no hunger that can't be filled at the fridge, or thirst that can't be quenched at the sink.
But there's also no hope.
For when the nightmares of nighttime end, the alarm goes off but nobody's really alarmed. And the nightmares of our waking hours continue.
No matter what the Bush-Cheney administration does, no matter how many of our civil rights they spit on, no matter how much confetti they make of the nation's Constitution, no matter how many wars and how many lies, no matter how many incompetent cronies they install in positions of power, no matter how obvious the President's lack of a soul, and no matter how many people he kills while giggling and chuckling and making no sense, Americans just don't seem to give a damn.
The nightmare continues, and there is no waking up.
© by the author.
What do you think?
There's much more than this at Unknown News.
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When the nightmares of nighttime end, the alarm goes off but nobody's really alarmed.
And the nightmares of our waking hours continue.
No matter what the Bush-Cheney administration does, no matter how many of our civil rights they spit on, no matter how much confetti they make of the nation's Constitution, no matter how many wars and how many lies, no matter how many incompetent cronies they install in positions of power, no matter how obvious the President's lack of a soul, and no matter how many people he kills while giggling and chuckling and making no sense, Americans just don't seem to give a damn.
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Say it with a bumper sticker
$3 each, or two for $5
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