Seek not to be understood

Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred . . . let me sow love
Where there is injury . . . pardon
Where there is doubt . . . faith
Where there is despair . . . hope
Where there is darkness . . . light
Where there is sadness . . . joy.
Divine Master,
Grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled . . . as to console
To be understood . . . as to understand,
To be loved . . . as to love.
For it is in giving, that we receive,
It is in pardoning, that we are pardoned,
It is in dying, that we are born to eternal life.

When I was in Dallas last week, I spent some time with a friend of mine from the Gulf Coast, who, with her daughter, ended up in Dallas after Hurricane Katrina. It is such a wonderful thing to be with people who understand. You don't have to explain where you're coming from, because that's where they're coming from, too.

My friend mentioned that she had attended a support group for Katrina survivors (there are a lot of them in Dallas). The one thing all of them said they found the hardest was that no one understands. That's a difficult place to be, compounding the effects of post-trauma that tend to cause one to feel alone and isolated to begin with. It goes beyond just a lack of understanding, though ... that's understandable. After all, how could anybody understand, who hasn't been through something like this?

What's hard to bear at times is what people do because of the lack of understanding ... at the very least, the thoughtless, offhand remarks, "it's been six months, why aren't they back to normal yet? Why don't they just get over it?"

It has been very interesting, as someone who was intimately involved in living through the Katrina experience, to see what other people have done with it ... using it for political purposes; making assumptions and judgments based on a very limited and often erroneous view of the facts; getting riled up and ranting about things that have little basis in reality and, actually, that have little to do with them personally; and, unfortunately, saying hateful and mean-spirited things about their fellow human beings.

Now for my own rant: I swear, if I hear one more person make an ignorant remark about "it's their fault for not having insurance" .... That statement has little to do with the reality of the situation. Most homeowners on the Gulf Coast had hurricane insurance -- their mortgage lenders required it. However, most people did not have flood insurance because the insurance companies would not sell it to them. The Mississippi Gulf Coast was not located in a flood plain, and therefore insurers were not required by federal law to make flood insurance available. Even those who did have insurance have found getting paid difficult.

Beyond that, though ... to think that having flood insurance would have made it all better? Your house, your town, your job are wiped out overnight, your social network destroyed and friends scattered across the country, and a check will somehow magically eliminate the effects of trauma? Money can be very helpful in starting over, but I think this illustrates the warped attitude about money that we've got in this culture.

I have my own speculations about peoples' motivation, some of which I've already expressed in this blog. I think it has a lot to do with denial. Either it couldn't have been that bad or it had to have been the survivors' fault. To think otherwise would lead a person inescapably to know that something similar could happen to them, too, and that they don't have control over everything in life. And that can be a hard thing to acknowledge.

Sometimes I will hear someone here in Portland say, "why did they keep living there when they knew it was likely to get hit by a bad hurricane? They knew it was just a matter of time."

My response is, "you live forty miles from an active volcano (Mt. St. Helens), and the experts are saying it's just a matter of time until it has another major eruption. You're also living in an area on active earthquake fault lines, and the Oregon coast is at risk for a devastating tsunami. So why are you still here?"

Comments

[Camy]

Sadly a phenomenon like Katrina that destroys a community is only going to be truly understood by those that suffered through it. I always meant to go to Mardi Gras. It was on my long list of things to do one day: now sadly that day will never come, at least in the New Orleans I grew reading about. It will be different.
When you live in a city, you take everything for granted. You see your neighbours day after day, but you never really get to know them until a disaster strikes.
Perhaps the 'community that was', though spread all over the US, might actually grow closer post Katrina.

[Lewis King]

This latest addition to your blog is a sad, but true, commentary on the lack of sensitivity, compassion and understanding that still exists in our world. Fortunately, this is slowly changing as more and more Light comes into the planet raising consciousness. In the meantime, it is best to follow your wise lead to seek not to be understood.

[Michael]

Kitty, Randi Rhodes on Air America made the same points you did on the insurance issue (she has her house in Florida and suffered damage from Hurricane Rita...she has a mortgage and is required to carry flood insurance..her flood insurance company cancelled her policy and blamed the damage on wind damage..and the wind insurance she had..they said her damage was due to flooding and wouldn't pay her claim....so, as she said, she had to get new insurance and pay a huge fortune since the Mortgage company was going to call in her Mortgage and foreclose on her.

As she said, first of all if you weren't in a flood zone (i.e. Mississippi, you couldn't get insurance) and where you were, they refused to pay and in the mean time you still had to pay a mortgage on a house that was no longer in existence and also pay rent...

I am so angry at what this current Administration has done...we need a Marshall Plan for the Gulf and instead Haliburton gets the Marshall Plan of cash in its back pocket....to the tune of billions to Bush's and Cheney's cronies!!!

grrrr!!

Michael