Katrina update

I haven't given you any Katrina updates recently, and just this weekend I got a handful of them myself, between talking to my mom and to friends who have been in Louisiana lately. The news is hopefully going to make you pray with greater intensity.

From the home front, one of my aunts came back to the city this week to find that her home had been looted. Since she is only a half-mile or so from my parents, this does very little to enhance my own peace of mind. (I don't know if the looting took place shortly after the floods or more recently.)

My Dad's doctor lost a friend (another doctor, age 49) to suicide. Two kids. There is anecdotal evidence of a higher than normal rate of suicide and of deaths due to cardiac incidents. I guess as people come home and try to salvage what they can, or (like my parents) live on site while work is being done, there is no way to limit the stress you are under. Mom is finding it very hard to deal with the dust penetrating everywhere in the house. She has air purifiers going all over the place; two in the bedroom, which is the only clean zone in the building.

And a friend who was on a singing tour and stayed with a Baton Rouge family reports that there are significant increases in crime, with break-ins and robberies in that city which absorbed so many of the evacuees. This really makes me mad. I know that such things are perpetrated by a relative few, and that those few probably didn't have much of a home life and probably brought themselves up, so it's not totally their fault they turned into sociopaths, but clearly the only thing they can do in society is prey upon its members. By the very nature of the problem, these persons are not actually members of a society, but stand outside of it. My inner redneck wants to just lock them all up some place, because it is so doubtful that persons whose very brain synapses were wired by neglect and abuse even have the capacity for rehabilitation. "Rehabilitate" means to bring people back to a former, adjusted situation. How can you do that with persons who were never habilitated to society in the first place? The only thing worse would be to allow these persons, now relocated to Baton Rouge, to establish a new non-society, where another generation would be similarly abused and neglected.

Convinced you to double your prayers yet?