Not severe enough for the Pit, but I can't handle dealing with reality any more.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

This thread, among others.

I have–

I can’t wrap my mind around the fact that this is reality. I have, effectively, shut off the “realization” part of my brain, and am now coasting along, laughing until I snort at Jon Stewart and the Onion, with the occasional twinge of “oh, FUCK” when I start to think too hard about the matter behind the jokes.

I can’t cope with this being reality. It’s so incredibly fucked-up as to defy belief, and I don’t believe it. I’m writing a resume and cover letter for my perfect Shakespeare library job, and going to a barbeque with my parents, and watching my brother run a track meet. I spent two days last week eating, breathing, and puking terrible reality, and I can’t handle it.

These people are so out-of-touch with life, and with actuality, and I can’t believe that no one’s saying “Fuck you, we’re going to get into the city and SAVE LIVES” (and I know some people may be, but this is too unreal. They’re probably as stunned as I am).

FEMA cut communications lines. FEMA turned help away more than a dozen times, by my reckoning. At one point, National Guardsmen were ordered to hold FEMA employees at gunpoint to stop them from interfering with rescues.

WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE?

Every time I try to comprehend it, I choke up, and start to cry, and throw up. I am done dealing with reality. I’ll be watching VH1 if you need me.

2

I feel the same way. I am just sick about the whole thing. It seems like a sick joke.

I saw this link on the board the other day and it really got me pissed off:

3

I think that’s why you see so many people who seem apathetic and oblivious to what’s going on around them. They shut everything out except what’s going on immediately in front of them, and even then they’re so consumed with what they have to do that day, or so lost in their own daydreams, that you wind up with a bunch of robots. Cattle. They don’t want to deal with reality because they know they can’t handle it. It’s a sick Earth that we live on, and it’s sad. Sometimes I wish one big, goddamn pill would just fall out of the sky and make everyone and everything better.

4

Ditto.

I have been concerned and disgusted about the growing level of apathy I’ve seen over the past decade. It seems that doing the right thing is way, WAY down the priority list, right under:

MAKING AS MUCH MONEY AS IS HUMANLY POSSIBLE BY WHATEVER MEANS NECESSARY

or

DOING WHAT I MUST TO FEED AND CLOTHE MY FAMILY AND KEEP THE LOAN COMPANY FROM TAKING MY HOUSE

There is very little accountability anymore. The smaller the town or the company, the greater the level of accountability, but even that has disappointed me.

The way officials handled (or failed to handle) the crisis after Katrina hit just put an exclamation point on all of it for me. Watching all those poor people suffer like that for just no good reason just became too much. The first couple of days, I just cried and cried while watching the coverage. Then I got REALLY PISSED OFF. I’m still pissed off. There’s just no excuse for it. NONE. And, like most Americans, I’ve been so complacent with the ugliness of this lack of accountability for so long that I’m not sure what to do with all my anger now that I’m finally awake again. I want to TAKE ACTION. I want to EFFECT CHANGE.

I think part of the reason we’ve all become so complacent is because we feel powerless most of the time and unable to create any positive change. We are either punished for standing up for the right thing (being demoted at work for disagreeing with a boss on principle, for example) or our efforts are fruitless (we go through the proper channels to make some small good thing happen for people, and no one notices or cares).

I think goodness and honesty just aren’t valued much anymore.

Someone please say something that changes my mind.

5

That’s exactly it! I know that after I saw the news the first few days after the hurricane hit, my first impulse was to grab our car, drive down there, take as many people as I could and feed them and give them a hot bath.

Not only can we not help, but we see the people who should be, and are able to, help, royally fucking it up on almost every level imaginable. I do feel powerless. You try to pin something down, make them change, make them do something, and all that happens is a “let’s not play the blame game!” zero-accountability puppy face.

I’m sitting here racking my brain for some way, any way, to get the message of “NO, YOU ARE FUCKING GOING TO SHUT UP AND HELP, AND YOU ARE GOING TO DO IT RIGHT THE FUCK THREE DAYS AGO” across and make it mean something, and there’s nothing I can do.

I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, I’m still feeling sick, and I’m beginning to understand the mentality that makes people sit at home and drink for hours alone in the dark, because I’m a very thin line away from that myself, just to try to make this Bizarro World go away.

It’s either do something or pretend it’s not happening, and I can’t do anything.

6

Marge gives Tracy a hug

7

Sure you can. Make up a care package, or a few, of canned food, soap, and other little necesseties, and then contact your local Red Cross or whoever deals with this in your area, to find out where you could mail it to. Include a little card that says something like, “Dear stranger, I don’t know you but I want you to know that I care and I want you to have this stuff”. Whoever will receive that kind of thing will be floored by the generosity in someone who doesn’t even know them helping them to survive. I know I would be if I was in the same situation as them. And you will feel better knowing you’ve done something Awesome!

8

Tracy Lord, you might consider getting a counselor to help you work through your feelings, so you can find a way to go on in your life and do the best good you can do in your own sphere. You’ve had a nasty knock, and the depression won’t “just go away” on it’s own most likely. Find someone who can help you work through this, so you can live life again. What you are describing is depression, which is understandable. I do understand where you and Large Marge are coming from, I feel very similar. I’ve come to terms with the idea that although I can’t make the grand, sweeping changes I’d like, I can at least do small things each day to help make “ripples in the pond” of some kind in the hopes that maybe it will keep some kind of decency alive in places.

9

I’m still trying to deal with the totally untenable two-pronged proposition that
a) the 23rd largest city in the United States has been effectively washed off the face of the Earth, and
b) official policy was basically not to give a shit until questions of authority, chain of command, protocol and procedure had been addressed.

I may be further down the road of jaded resignation than Tracy, but I have to admit that b) surprises me a whole lot less than a).

10

Tracy-I truly empathize with what you are feeling.
I’ve experienced much of the same sense of hopelessness and apathy in the past few years.
What has helped me tremendously is getting involved-even in a small way.
Instead of sitting at home and brooding about the issues that concern me- I now work at changing the things I detest the most.
Admittedly it sometimes feels like an exercise in futility but at other times, I do believe I’m making a very small difference.

I recently spent two weekends working at Camp Casey, feeding the masses of supporters. It was long hard hot work but extremely rewarding. I got a chance to really talk to people that felt exactly as I did and to contribute to the anti-war movement.
I came home tired and sweaty but with a renewed sense of purpose.
I suggest that perhaps you might want to pick out the one or two things that you’d most like to change-in your neighborhood, in your country or in the world and seek out organizations that share your goal.
Then go out and do something.
I think you’ll be amazed at how much better it will make you feel.

11

Tracy, I’m having a hard time understanding the reality of this, too. It’s so huge, and it didn’t need to be nearly this bad. I want to help, but there’s not much I can do right now because I don’t even have money to donate. :frowning: I’ve kind of overdosed on news stories, so now I’m avoiding the news, but I feel like I really need to know what’s going on.

True, there are a lot of people who are apathetic, but there are also many, many people who are giving money and time and soap and deodorant and clothes to help out people who lost everything. For all of the self-centered, apathetic people who just don’t care, there are many others who are doing whatever they can to help. People like you, people who care, will be going to New Orleans to help clean up the mess and rebuild.

12

Thanks so much for the empathy and commisseration, everyone.

Part of my frustration with the level of screw-ups is that I feel like even if I do give (which I have), it won’t do any good, because the organization to whom I give either won’t know how to use it or will be prevented from using it.

Once the air starts to clear, hopefully heads will have rolled and there’ll be a clear way to help that I feel I can trust. Until then, I’ll be hanging out in Denialsville.

13

Two things you can do:
(1) You can give more money. Even if it’s not very much. Even if typing numbers into the red cross website seems cold and impersonal, it’s still doing a good deed which will make a real impact in someone’s life. You could also go post about it in the SDMB donations thread, although there’s a chance that doing so makes you an asshole. We’re looking into it.
(2) You can read things like the really amazing story linked in post #2, and note that, even in the midst of all the horror, and all the fuckups, there is still so much caring and generosity and heroism. There’s been some hideous beureaucratic fucking up during this disaster, but the goodness of the human spirit is still there. This is still a country full of decent, loving, caring people.

14

My partner in crime at work is leaving tomorrow for New Orleans along with one or two of my other coworkers. We will be spelling each other off in three or four week “hitches”.

Because I’m under contract to one of the colleges here, in addition to my “real” job, my turn in New Orleans won’t come until the winter break, but I have five, close to six weeks off, and have gladly volunteered to stay the entire time, if need be to spell off my coworkers who have little kids, wives and family that they’d like to be with during the holidays.

We are “only” an environmental company, so our focus won’t be rescue, but the rebuild. Specifically Human Health Risk Assessment, which is a fancy way of saying we’re going to be wading in and sampling nasty stuff to make sure what’s safe and what isn’t and assisting the construction companies with the rebuild by saying what needs to go, what’s safe and so on.

Our education and skills are in that area, so we’ll give what we can there and happy to do it. We were all talking about it today, those of us who volunteered to go. We know it will be hard and yucky and sad, but we want to do our part whatever we can.

It’s not much, it’s not the rescue that’s so badly needed now, but it’s what we have to offer it’s where our skills can best be used to help rebuild the city.

I know that’s not very much, but more Americans that not DO care, it’s just that as you said, many are downtrodden with trying to keep the wolf from their own door.

How would you in good conscience be able to stop feeding and clothing your own children to go feed and clothe someone else’s? I don’t know what kind of saint it would take who could do that.

Sorry, wish I could say or give more than that, but I am pretty sure that’s the boat most average Americans are in.

15

One person acting alone can do very little, true.

But if you join with a group of people who are just as angry as you are, and work together, you can fix it.

www.dailykos.com

Don’t listen to the people who say government can’t do anything right.
Don’t listen to the people who say all politicians are worthless.
Don’t listen to the people who say politics is pointless.
Don’t listen to the people who say you can’t make a difference.

Those are lies. They are lies told by people who want to stay in power no matter how badly they do their jobs.

Get mad. Get furious. And FIGHT.

Or next time, it might be YOU in the Superdome, waiting for the buses that never come … .

16

Thanks for the links. I just sent a very nasty letter to President Bush via moveon.org, and I actually feel a bit better.

17

God, why is it that every time someone makes a perfectly reasonable thread describing a perfectly reasonable breakdown in the face of a massive and much-needed reality check someone’s gotta turn around and say it’s some problem with them, instead of a perfectly natural response to the cognitive dissonance forced upon Americans day in day out? Maybe if everyone replaced the three hours a week they spend talking to their therapist with three hours of fighting against the system we’d actually get something done. No wonder the rest of the world hates us; we’re too busy navel-gazing and trying to “life life,” which just means that we need to absorb enough doublethink to fill up our Walmart shopping cart to an acceptable degree.

I think anyone who didn’t cry when they read the reports is a monster. So there.

18

Chill. If you’d read the rest of my post instead of jerking your knee, you’d have seen that actually I feel empathy with the OP and Large Marge. Nowhere did I imply they were at fault, or that what the felt was un-natural. In fact:

I think people who don’t even bother to at least ask the person what they meant, and call names instead are…rather dullwitted. Just my opinion, YMMV.

19

I understand what y’all are saying, with the suggestions to donate, help, and volunteer, but I don’t feel like I can trust any organization to get my help to the people who need it. I’m not “listening” to anyone, I’m looking at what’s going on, evaluating it, and feeling this absolute, sinking helplessness.

I should probably stop reading/participating in the threads about it, but I’m caught between the sort of guilty “stay informed!” and the “stop making yourself sick by reading all of it.”

20

If you get a chance, listen to this weeks edition of “This American Life” on NPR. They will have the whole show on thier website next week. Unbelievable. It made me cry.
http://www.thislife.org/