The racing and other games need to go on

I share blogger David Green's concern, and yes, some anguish, over the situation along the U.S. Gulf of Mexico. I admire, too, Lori Munro's ability to capture so many of the week's emotions and display them so eloquently.

David lived for a little while in Bay St. Louis, Miss., and it was my good fortune to have spent some time in nearby Long Beach while I worked at one of the newspapers that eventually got blended into The Sun Herald in Biloxi and Gulfport.

New Orleans was, of course, pretty close. And the trouble there hurts, too, but a lot of it just makes me mad. And anger, while no picnic and certainly less than an enviable emotion, doesn't feel quite as bad as hurt.

I'd lived a short way off U.S. 90 in Long Beach for several months (most everyone does along that part of the coast because after you get a little farther inland, it's mostly pine thickets) before I took a closer look at a field on the opposite side of the street from the driveway. The field had a bunch of scrub pines, briar patches and other underbrush kinds of things. I had never really given it much thought.

Then one day I looked a little closer. The place was rife with concrete slabs. They looked to have roughly the same square footage as most of the houses in our part of town, with maybe just enough extra concrete to count as a carport. There must've been several dozen of them in that one area.

That made me think of other areas just like it all over the Mississippi coast then, in the mid-1980s. And it dawned on me that those must've been areas never rebuilt after Hurricane Camille in 1969. Each represented a family's loss, no doubt their great suffering at the time and in the aftermath of that storm, which until this week was the benchmark for most coastians.

I've swapped a few yarns with some of the folks in ThatsRacin.com's forums this week, too, and I share a lot of their disgust with the looters, the chaos, corruption and utter lack of preparedness in New Orleans. I agree to a point, too, with a poster who faults the media for the focus on looters while missing so many of the stories about all of the good folks doing all they can to help.

The looters are every bit as real, though, as the putrid and potentially poisonous waters engulfing the Big Easy, where life will be anything but until some serious help arrives and the water recedes. And for quite a while afterward, apparently. Blaming the media, itself an easy out, doesn't help this time either.

Here's a question for you: Should the racing, our other sports and diversions stop for a little while? Would that be the proper way to demonstrate our support for the victims and those who are trying to help?

I don't think so. But I'm not here to argue with anyone who feels differently this time.

This time I'm going to shut up, send some  meager donations in and try to remember how well parts of Long Beach, Miss., and other towns along the coast were able to recover - as difficult as it must have been - after Camille. Because I know those good people can do it again.

And, at  least for a little while, I'm going to try and cut my own humble abode in Charlotte a little slack. The next few times the stairs creak a little too loudly or I stop to think about how long I've been putting off painting and fixing the deck, here's what I'm going to do:

I'm going to just flat stop, remember our friends in Mi'ssippi and Louisiana, and say a little thanks that my house - many needs though it surely has - is still standing, the ground around it fairly dry.