I just don't know what to say.

It seems so petty and ridiculous to worry about weight-loss issues or health or food or exercise right now, in the face of pretty much having a major U.S. city drop into the ocean, that I've been concentrating on just being able to maintain my actions. Talking about them seemed-- and still does-- like a step over the line. So even though I promised a long time ago that I would keep this blog focused on health, food, exercise, and things related, and that I would try to sidestep doing (unrelated) political rants, I'm taking a break from that policy today.

I'm just stunned.

It's not so much the destruction that's boggling me as what it has revealed to me about the nature of hurricane evacuation. See, I grew up in Kansas. No hurricanes. Leaving town to flee a disaster is a concept foreign to me, although it is strongly drilled into my head that being prepared to get into the basement with any irreplaceables (better, into a hidey-hole with a concrete cap and a steel door with six contact points, as the Texas Tech Wind Sciences Department advises) any time a tornado comes within twenty miles. What little I've known about pre-hurricane evacuation is what I've historically seen on TV and in news articles, and the people they interview who leave never mention the cost of it, and the people they interview who are staying are always the die-hard rah-rah No Stupid Hurricane Is Gonna Tell Me What To Do boneheads, who never mention economic circumstances as a reason to stay. Perhaps I'm stupid, or ignorant, or just blissfully self-involved, but it never in a million years occurred to me to think about the financial ramifications of fleeing a storm.

First of all, there's the question of where one would go. If you don't have friends or relatives within a decent driving range, you apparently either have to sleep in your car or find a motel. I am told (now, after I've made an ass of myself among my friends who've lived in the South) that it's common practice for hotels and motels in the refugee zone to jack up their prices in response to the demand, as if fleeing from a hurricane is the same thing as wanting to attend Mardi Gras or the Superbowl. Even at normal prices, I find that staying at a hotel is something I'd have to budget for; since saving money is apparently a concept foreign to middle-class America (and impossible to manage for the lower class), I doubt that many people have a hurricane fund set up for the possibility that they'd have to stay out of town for a few days once or twice a summer.

Then there's the question of how to transport yourself out of town. Again, this is a situation that disproportionately favors everyone above a certain economic level; not only do you have to own a car, you have to be able to fuel it-- and under normal gas prices these days, that's a stretch, and again, price-gouging is common in the path of hurricane refugees. For those who don't have a car, you'd have to be able to afford a bus ticket-- oh, but wait, Greyhound stopped running busses out of New Orleans days before Katrina hit. So did the airlines, which left many tourists high and dry (although an article in a Chicago paper indicates that some well-off folk from Chi-town who were dropping their kid off for college at Tulane punted by hiring a limo to get out of town).

In short, unless you have a very good network of friends and family who can tote you out and let you crash on a couch somewhere, you must make this much money (imagine me holding my hand up at neck level) to indulge in the luxury of fleeing the storm. Also, you must be relatively young and healthy; if you're old and it's hard for you to get around, or if you are in a nursing home or a hospital, you're stuck. It's a marvel to me that the South keeps rejecting Darwinism, because they're living it. Only the strong (and the rich) survive. If you don't have the resources to make it out yourself, apparently you deserve what you get.

I always wondered why people stayed. Now I know. Only about 5% of them are the jackasses interviewed ahead of the storm by CNN or The Weather Channel, partaking of some kind of my-balls-are-bigger-than-yours contest and boasting that no storm can phase them. The other 95% just can't afford it, or might, might be able to afford it but can't take the chance that they'd be wasting money that they might otherwise be able to use for health care and food and clothing. Son of a bitch.

In Mississippi, which boasts the highest poverty rate in the nation, people are furious that they were abandoned to the wrath of the storm. Yeah, I'm with them on this one; I'd be pissed, too. In retrospect, what the hell is wrong with us that we don't have a system set up to accommodate this, that we force people to have to make these sorts of decisions, these sorts of desperate gambles? That's just wrong.

I'm seriously boggled here. I had no idea. I'm really dismayed at the lack of preparation, I'm horrified that the Army Corps of Engineers (who appear to have been almost single-handedly holding things together in normal times) had their funding cut again, and again, and again. I'm amazed at the sheer goodness of people that's coming out now-- the swift organization of websites where people can volunteer housing for refugees, the fundraising, the sharing of information-- but this is a clear case where an ounce of preparation would've been worth a ton of mop-up work after the fact. If there had been some network available (and widely publicized) for people to find a way out of the path of the storm and flooding, and to find shelter, the numbers of dead and injured and trapped down in Louisiana and Mississippi might be much lower right now. I'm not going to get into the question of whose place it is to develop that system, but seriously, this is one of those cases where decidedly not talking about the lower classes has directly led to the lower classes getting royally screwed.

Running to the basement to escape a tornado is easy, and cheap. Running away from a hurricane is complicated and costly. This sucks. This really, really sucks.