“I am going to build a porch for my wife out of those center bricks,” Alvin said as we stacked them in a corner on his property, 10 tons of them.
We are complex beings, living in an ever-changing world, and one of our Gods giving ability is the possibility to cope with difficulties we face. And the difficulties are endless. They stop selling your breakfast cereal and nobody understands you when you search for marzipan in the store. And we cope by displacement, buying another cereal and buying Betty Crooker apple-pie instead of baking one with marzipan. Our coping mechanism usually works well, without us even noticing or thinking about this ability to confront the difficulties of life.
But what if, suddenly everything turns upside down, if it is not only your favorite cereal that is not available, the whole breakfast aisle is missing; in fact the store has disappeared. My coping mechanism would of course respond by thinking McDonalds, but if McD is literally blown away, what then?
It is tempting to use statistics, bring up charts and graphs showing how people cope with disaster or do not cope. We heard different statistical “facts in December. Some of the “facts were ways people use to project their own fears and emotions on to “the others. We heard from different sources the skyrocketing “suicide-attempts, the increase of patients at mental institutions, and misuse of alcohol and drugs. There is an increase for sure but official statistics are far from the “urban legends numbers.
There was a way of coping that we all could feel and see. The need for reasoning. There is somehow, something, someone, some-some, that we can understand. I, my self, was angry, I needed to blame, find answer, the weather is not an easy scapegoat, to point at, to difficult to predict or personalize.
To my surprise I did not hear God on the list of scapecoats, at least not down there. But the scapecoats were endless, Nagin, FEMA, the Governor, global warming, FEMA, Bush, Liability issues of all kinds, FEMA, Missouri Synod, ELCA, FEMA, the big multinational corporations causing weather-changes, LDR, FEMA, levees, money, and so on and so on, and hopefully I did not to forgot to mention FEMA. Even few weeks ago I saw somewhere that it was all Karl Roves fault. I am a foreigner so I not sure who that is, maybe you arent either, but he seems to be responsible for everything in this country, so in fact it might have been him (… or not).
We also meet people without a home, that have turned the Maslow pyramid of need upside down, those folks are helping others making sense of there life, without having sense of their own future. They are living life as some kind of a spinning top, Maslow spinning top, spinning fast, to avoid dropping to the side. And those people helping are doing a great job, giving their lives literally for the sake of others.
It is tempting to use words as denial, intellectualization, idealization or somatization, academical words. We can see it all there, but the different ways of coping are best understood in what we heard, from the people we met, still living their daily life in midst of the destruction.
They will come back, and then we can go with them to the golf course and everything will be back as it was, said a retired Air Force soldier, when we spoke together in Mississippi. I was able to build back, so are they.
It still smells the same, but it was part of my former life, it is not part of my new life. Brent did leave everything behind, even his basball glove; he plans to start a whole new life.
We had only 3 feet of standing water in our house.Laughing, you have to be able to smile, was the message from Mike Smith, still living in a trailer outside his former house.
We go from house to house, trailer to trailer, offering people help to get what they are entitled to. That is the least we can do.
One of my ways of coping is found in the hope. Hope that someday I can drop in at Alvins new home, accept his invitation to sit on his porch, and eat an apple pie made of real marzipan. Sit on the porch made of the 10 tons of center bricks we moved one brick at at a time in November 2006.
Halldór Elías Guðmundsson