Take the time...
by Jared Williams

If you’ve been affected by these storms, let me ask you a question. Have you taken time to grieve and to breathe, to just sit back from it all? You’ve lost a lot. The whole nation has lost a part of itself, in fact.

A lot of people don’t know about the Gulf Coast, so I’m not sure they know exactly what’s been taken from them just yet. The Mississippi Gulf Coast (MGC, as we say) has always had an odd relationship with the rest of the state (they call us “coast trash,” for example, and we seem to have more in common with Mobile, AL, and Slidell, LA than we do even with Hattiesburg, just ninety minutes up the road).

But here’s what I learned growing up there: nobody’s too important and nobody’s too insignificant, either. There’s a sense of the egalitarian there that I think comes from the racial mix, among other things (being left to your own devices, for the most part, helps out a lot, too, by the way). My high school was roughly 50/50 Caucasian and African-American, so one of the first things one learns there is how to get along with people who aren’t exactly like you.

The normal cliques were there, but they just had a different vibe to them. No door was completely closed, and no group offered “protection”. In other words, nobody was too good to avoid getting the piss taken out of them, as they say, at a moment’s notice. Nothing too violent, just an array of those words that are supposedly less dangerous than sticks and stones.

Some of my friends from Pascagoula are the funniest people I know, but that humor is born from the knowledge that each day would be filled with funny stories that you would have to top or jeers you would have to answer.

Much of that life is gone now.

In the same way New Orleans gave the country a place to relax. A sort of laid back Vegas with more of an “Old World” appeal. You don’t have to build a fake Eiffel Tower there when you’ve got still got residents who primarily speak French. You don’t need casinos (although they have them) with glitz and fancy chefs when any New Orleanian kitchen will regale you with food and laughter like nowhere else.

A lot of that is gone now, too.

Remnants remain, but even now, seven months later, it’s just not the same. It’s one thing to “rough it”, to go somewhere “quaint” where each delay is accepted knowingly, if not gladly. It’s as if this extra time is somehow sweeter. We visit these places to slow down, but we usually don’t stay there.

In my town, over half of the houses are now unlivable. City Hall was relocated to a series of trailers and any public space that avoided the flooding is being used. Life there is broken. Life there is slow. The simplest of tasks have become journeys worthy of family-legends and dinner table tales for years to come.

This is what must be mourned and grieved over. Ways of life have been set back several decades, but the demands of life have not. Living in a trailer in your front lawn is not living in your house. Just because you may have more than you thought you would when “THE BIG ONE” hit, or even if you avoided the storm altogether, that does not mean you should neglect to cry over what has been lost.

The Book of Ecclesiastes tells us there’s a season for everything, and now is the season to mourn if you haven’t already. To cry out to whomever you will that life as you know it has been stripped away.

Weep, shout, get mad, do it all. Then return to building your new life with the knowledge that your neighbors far and wide mourn with you and will join you in the dream of something better.