The Great Crisis Moratorium of 2011

Do you know what I'm sick and tired of?

I'm sick and tired of being in the big, fat middle of crisis.

I mean, I was born during the Cold War -- I remember having "Civil Defense Drills" in addition to "Tornado Drills."  Really, like "duck and cover" under your school desk would have had any deterrent effect on a nuclear weapon.  We even had to have plans to get home from school without transportation after the atomic explosion! 

(It's a good thing we never had a real atomic attack because our plan obviously wasn't very good.  On the day of the practice run when I was in about the 4th grade my friend, Susan, and I got lost on the way to her house where my Mama was to pick me up so we could begin life in post-apocalyptic central Arkansas.  Definitely not a good plan.).

There were the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination of JFK, the assassination of RFK and MLK (and the ensuing riot in my junior high courtyard by the few neighborhood black students because the flag was flown at half-staff for only 3 days to mourn Dr. King).  There were the Vietnam War, Apollo 13, and school desegregation.

Ah, school desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas.  Now there was a well-thought-out plan if ever I lived through one.  Not.  Seriously.  Really not.

Having fought against actually doing the desegregating part since 1957, and doing only piecemeal integration in the interim, the LR School District finally got around to integrating the public schools in the early 70s.  But, instead of starting at the elementary level, where young kids could grow up going to school with people whose skin color was different, and learning to be friends the way that kids learn to be friends, they chose to start at the high school level.  With pleasant, easily accepting-of-change adolescents. 

And they didn't just bus everyone around to mix up the races.  No -- they chose to wreck the black community by closing down their high school, Horace Mann, and divvying up all the Mann students among the white high schools via long bus rides.  They also gerrymandered the attendance zones of the white schools, thus messing up all kinds of extra-curricular activities.  And of course, this pleased no one. 

So, there were race riots at my high school and I was in the big fat middle of them.  My parents almost shipped me off to All Saints Boarding School in Vicksburg to finish high school, but my "cooler head" fortunately prevailed.  (Actually, it probably wasn't my cool head -- it was probably my screaming, crying hissy fit at having to leave the high school honey and cheerleading squad).

I lost my mother's mother in September 1977, then I lost my own mother the following month.  She was a few months shy of 46; I was barely 23 and an only child.  That's a crisis.

Crises seemed to die down when I was a young lawyer, wife, and mother -- or maybe I just chose to ignore them.  Well, there was that one incident with our baby daughter in intensive care with meningitis for several weeks, and we had our fair share of bad weather and stock market "corrections" during those years, I suppose. (Yeah -- that was a pretty spiffy little "correction" that landed us a 13% adjustable rate mortgage when we moved into our second home in 1983.)  There were probably lots of natural disasters, too.

But, holy cow!  Skipping over the Clinton years (and the teenage years of the daughters), since 9/11 it seems like the crises are non-stop!

International markets fluctuating wildly. Popes dying.  Volcanoes erupting and stopping trans-Atlantic flights.  Pirates.  Wars in far-away places.  Funky viral illnesses and super-bugs.  Tsunamis and earthquakes and tornadoes.  The Oil Spill and shut-down of drilling and fishing in the Gulf.  The Obama administration.

Katrina.

And now, the Great Flood of 2011.  (And the "survivors' guilt" that comes with it.)

And the termites are swarming, which means they're busy making all kinds of new, baby termites.  These are freaking termites, not snowflakes.

I'm sick and tired of feeling anxious.

And, despite being on 5 doses daily of 2 different antibiotics for 5 days, I still can't knock out this stupid infection, and if I wind up in the hospital on IV antibiotics I'll ruin my baby girl's wedding shower next weekend (and if I wind up on steroids, I'll swell up and will look like a sausage stuffed into my Mother of the Bride dress, and we. just. simply. can't. have. that!!).

So, from this moment forward (until after June 8th, at least) I am calling for a moratorium on Crises.

C'mon! Who's with me!  Seriously, I'm a little cranky here -- who's with me?!?!

April Showers Went a Little Overboard This Year

There's been a little excitement around here the last few days.  We get a little over-anxious in New Orleans when the "F" word is being bandied about.  No, not that "F" word, the "Flood" word.

The Bonne-Carre spillway is slowly being opened to divert Mississippi River water into Lake Pontchartrain (which causes its own problems with fish and other marine critters, both salt and freshwater varieties, but I digress), but we've already hit flood stage here.  So, by Tuesday, the Morganza spillway northwest of Baton Rouge will be opened, thus dooming lots of land in the Atchafalaya Basin to flood, but the most densely populated areas of southeast Louisiana should be spared.  If the Morganza stays closed, this is what the Corps projects:

Moogie's Mansion, at 10 blocks from the Mississippi River, would be in the yellow 15 to 20 foot flood depth level.  Not a pleasant thought because the Mansion's dirt is 8 feet above sea level, and the actual structure sits another 3 feet above that.  Even math-challenged Moogie can cypher that (8 + 3) < (15 to 20).

But, even though we got a pretty good preview of what's coming as we drove home by a different route last weekend that tracked the Mississippi and spat us out in Vicksburg near the Yazoo's confluence, I don't have that "impending doom" feeling like I did before Katrina, and the ghosts aren't acting up, so I believe we should be just fine here.  My heart breaks for those who aren't so fortunate.

From an historical and intellectual perspective, this website contains more than you would ever want to know about controlling the Mississippi and flood protection.  It is kinda interesting, though.

Let's say a few prayers for those in the waters' path.