Above:A 360-degree photo shows a rusted boat and other wreckage at Bayou Caddy, a port west of Waveland. (John Brecher / MSNBC.com)
About this project
In the coming months, MSNBC.com will focus its coverage of the Hurricane Katrina recovery on two cities on the hard-hit Mississippi coast.
Though Bay St. Louis and Waveland are far from the media spotlight on New Orleans, the intertwined fates of the people, businesses and institutions in these towns tell the story of an entire region's struggle to recover from the most destructive storm in U.S. history.
It's hard to try to describe to people outside the area what's going on mentally with a lot of us down here. As we pass the seven month mark since the storm, many of us are suffering from the anxiety and uncertainty of our situations. Many folks still haven't had their insurance issues resolved, and many plans are still up in the air over whether to rebuild, or move, or just what. Lots of folks that I know say that they seem to be in the "anger" stage of the grieving process, men and women alike. I figure that living in "Post-Mississippi" can be likened to its initials.
The best way I can think to describe it to people is to imagine that your irritability level is a glass of water. Under normal circumstances, this glass is about a quarter full, and a drop or two or one hundred doesn't really make that much difference, or affect you that much. For those of us in Mississippi right now, it's like our glass of irritability is absolutely full. One drop (or slight irritant) can often be the difference between being a normally functioning human being, and a weeping, crying basket case. We just hope that those drops come at socially acceptable times, or after we've at least gotten off of work. Living in a cramped trailer, worrying about next hurricane season, still wondering if our acquaintances and neighbors are alive and OK or displaced or coming back, wondering if our favorite restaurant in the next town is still standing, strife over money, the rising cost of building supplies and whether the shortage of labor will allow us to get our houses and lives back together. All of these things add up, and so that shopping cart with the stuck wheel might provoke an unusually (and seemingly irrationally) fierce response. Sometimes it just seems like one thing after another after another after another.
This past weekend I went to the Youth Legislature, which is sponsored by the YMCA.
It is a really fun program sponsored by the school. You get to write a bill and try to get it passed into law. Mine did not pass but I won "most outstanding senator."
Obviously, in my last post the point I was trying to make didn’t come across as I had intended it to.
My bad. It just so happens that I am not a journalist with a half a dozen college degrees. Each and every one of those individuals I mentioned in those “headline news stories” probably donated generously to help the thousands and thousands of homeless families here on the coast. At least I pray they did.
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