Showing posts with label Ida. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ida. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 01, 2021

Home is where the hurt is

This one minute of television from Baton Rouge covers a lot of ground.

The clip, from WAFB's hurricane coverage, also hints -- like after Katrina -- at the wrenching decisions about rebuilding or abandonment that will need to be made after Ida, like they had to be made after Katrina . . . and weren't. The Gulf won't stop rising, South Louisiana won't stop sinking, and hurricanes won't stop getting nastier and more frequent.

The heart says "home." The cold, hard facts of life ask you what will happen first -- that "home" bankrupts you, and everybody else, or that "home" kills you, because you've made your stand on ground that can't be defended, and which you have a hard time even calling "ground" anymore.

Nothing -- nothing -- will break your heart like home. That covers the increasingly untenable forces of climate and geology, and it covers all the myriad reasons those of us who left home behind had for leaving home behind. Because there's only one "home." Even when you barely recognize it anymore, or when the things you recognize the most are the reasons you had to go.

AND FOR so many of us in so many "homes," the last few years have been an apocalypse -- in the Greek sense of the word. An unveiling.

My new favorite Brit saying is "It's the hope that kills you." (Sorry, Ted Lasso.) Well, these are the times that it's the home that kills you.

My dread is that all my sane, non-MAGA Nebraska family and friends are, in these times, learning a bitter, bitter lesson that I received decades ago in my homeland. Hope often can't fix home. And that just fucking kills you.