Like most
of you, I watched in horror the scenes of the aftermath of the tornado that
swept through Moore, Oklahoma this past Monday. Mr. Ashbury had to leave the
room at one point, unable to watch any longer once it was announced that some
children had been lost in the wreckage of the school.
For us,
because we've been there, nothing is harder to bear witness to than the loss of
a child, or the scenes that follow, of the parents having to cope with that
loss.
He and I
do have differing views on some things. I don't believe in turning away from all
bad news completely; for myself, I always seek to understand people, in all of
their possible situations and predicaments. Even an author of fiction chronicles
humanity and needs to get that right.
But I
guess you could say I am also always looking for the gold amid the dross. Crap
happens with alarming regularity and with impunity to just about everyone.
There's a core to me that insists on believing that there has to be a basic
something at the heart of these tragedies that transcends the corporeal. If we
let the bad in life be the bottom line, then the bad consumes us and the bad
wins.
Debris is
a word that somehow fails to communicate the degree of devastation that I saw.
What I witnessed on my television screen was houses and other
buildings, made of plywood and large pieces of lumber and brick and concrete
reduced to kindling and dust. Aluminum siding became twisted missiles of metal.
Debris has such a nice, classy sound to it but there was nothing classy in what
I was looking at.
It is a
heart-stopping, reality-shaking experience to stand before a pile of rubble and
know that is all that is left of the house you had, the house where you lived
and loved and laughed. That experience is made easier if your loved ones are
safe. Because as total as that loss is, it's still the loss of stuff and not
lives.
So I was
looking at this field of rubble that stretched for so far and I thought, how the
hell do you fix that? Where do you start? And as I was watching and listening to
the coverage, I heard the reporters say that the path this monster storm took on
Monday was nearly the exact same path as their last monster storm on May
3, 1999.
That was
just 14 years ago! I would imagine that many of the people whose homes were
turned to rubble on Monday also had the same thing happen to them back then. The
current mayor of Moore, Mr. Glenn Lewis, was also the mayor during the 1999
tornado. In other words, these people have been there, done that,
and now are about to do it all over again.
You hear
that from time to time, as you watch the news coverage of natural disasters.
Some people have had their lives destroyed, have rebuilt, and then have them
trashed again.
And as I
was thinking about that I realized I had found my golden nugget.
We humans
can be and are many things. We can do good, or not; we can make a difference in
the lives of others, or not. But our species, at its heart, has an indomitable
spirit that seems to rise to the occasion in the moments of greatest challenge.
Yes,
there are always going to be some people who don't reach out, who don't
help—some who have a "me first" or "me only" attitude. But there are also always
those who do reach out, who do put others first and they are the ones whose
image, whose presence, shines the brightest.
We will
forever carry in our collective consciousness the memory of these people. The
first responders running into the World Trade Center; the ordinary people
side by side with uniformed cops and soldiers running toward the bomb
blast in Boston; and now in Moore, the image of teachers stretching their bodies
over the tiny bodies of their students, their only instinct to care for and
protect these children. These are the examples of what humanity can be,
and these are the images that endure.
This is
who we are at our core, and this is how we need to think of ourselves, from time
to time—as part of a whole that perseveres and in the end, triumphs over
adversity.
Please
donate something to help the people of Oklahoma rebuild. Even five dollars will
make a difference. You can give to your church or local bank, to the Red Cross
at www.redcross.org or, if you're Canadian and want to
help you can go to the Canadian Red Cross web site, http://www.redcross.ca/donate.asp and one
of the options listed for donations is "Donate to the 2013 Tornadoes and Severe
Weather USA Fund" . You don't even have to have a credit card. They take
PayPal.
Love,
Morgan
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