The kindness of strangers take two

Come let us mock at the great
That had such burdens on the mind
And toiled so hard and late
To leave some monument behind,
Nor thought of the levelling wind.

Come let us mock at the wise;
With all those calendars whereon
They fixed old aching eyes,
They never saw how seasons run,
And now but gape at the sun.

Come let us mock at the good
That fancied goodness might be gay,
And sick of solitude
Might proclaim a holiday:
Wind shrieked - and where are they?

Mock mockers after that
That would not lift a hand maybe
To help good, wise or great
To bar that foul storm out, for we
Traffic in mockery.
---Yeats: 1919

There is a problem in getting our opinions from the media.

Catholicism must be based not on political ideology: our politics should be parallel to and inspired by our faith and our insights in prayer.
Unless our selfhood is grounded in our own experience it is useless.

I again am commentin on a previous link. this one:
"Mr. Crawford and most of his compatriots in fact sound like a bunch of louts: vulgar, contemptuous of the Iraqi people and their culture, an obscene caricature of the worst aspects of America in its decline..."

Alas, such stupidity can only be said by one who knows no youth and noone in the National Guard...

Sorry, but I'm still angry. I spent 10 years in the National Guard and got my knowledge of the Guard in war and peace from experience, not from a book crafted to fit into the niche of nihilism.

As Peggy Noonan wrote of Hollywood:The Clooney generation in Hollywood is not writing and directing movies about life as if they've experienced it, with all its mysteries and complexity and variety. In an odd way they haven't experienced life; they've experienced media. Their films seem more an elaboration and meditation on media than an elaboration and meditation on life...Most Americans aren't leading media, they're leading lives. It would be nice to see a new respect in Hollywood for the lives they live.

So do we hear this?.

these units helped.....LINK
LINK2
LINK3
LINK4

What about these people?
Yup. They helped too.

We have heroes all around us. Yet unless you watch "storm Stories" you wouldn't know about any of them.

How many of you have read THIS
or these:

Biloxi
Lutheran Youth

Gulfport
Baptists and the US Navy

How about Louisiana?

Let's see.
The Methodists are there
so are the Mennonites
The Lutherans and the Garden city community college students are there
So are lots of different Baptists
Students from York College
So are the Presbyterians
and the Jews
LINK2
LINK3even mentions the catholics
Catholiclink4

This article lists recent churchgroups helping out in Mississippi...including many mainstream Christian groups such as already mentioned: But also Mormons and Muslims helping out..."More than 10,000 religious people across the country have poured through the stricken Mississippi Gulf Coast in an unprecedented volunteer effort."

And this article mentions Pagans from the Burning man festival..."Burners without Borders"...

On CNNI and the press show all sorts of stories of "slow cleanup"...without context.

To give an idea of the scope of cleaup: from an insurance newspaper:
Hurricane Katrina created an estimated 60.3 million cubic yards of debris in Louisiana, 25 times as much as the ruins of the World Trade Center and enough to fill the Superdome more than 13 times. Of that, only 32 million cubic yards, or a bit more than half, has been removed...Katrina's toll on Mississippi was staggering: $125 billion in estimated damage, 231 dead and more than 65,000 houses destroyed. More than 33,000 families in Mississippi are living in FEMA trailers, with thousands on a waiting list.
-------------------------------------
maybe we need to search out the positive stories.

I almost wrote: But maybe we also need to get off our tushies and get to work...but that is going to be discussed in my next essay.