There’s been too much tragedy around here without reasonable explanation, and I think it’s time for a few answers. In the stages of grieving this would be #3 – Anger and Bargaining. Clearly I’m on the upper end of of it and a good four stages away from anything close to Acceptance or Hope.

I guess the horror of Thursday’s campground flood here in Arkansas is the last straw for me. If I were a church-going woman there might be words to comfort during such an event. Here in the South we’ve been inundated by disasters natural and unnatural, and I refuse to believe it’s part of some plan, punishment, or reward orchestrated by a God arranging and rearranging our fates like a macabre puppet master. If That Televangelist (he knows who he is) chimes in to blame us all for homosexuality, Obama, or using the wrong dinner fork, my head will explode. Better yet, I’ll go fetch him so he can dig barehanded in the muddy bank of the Little Missouri River for other people’s children.

The tornadoes, the oil, the flooding. Hurricane season just began and we’re all waiting for the other shoe to drop. And it probably will. When Katrina turned New Orleans into a scene from Dante, we pushed the boundaries of English attempting to create language to describe it. Tragedy, disaster, catastrophe – these won’t be enough to describe what could happen when hurricane meets oil, two, three, maybe four times. People will leave the coast forever.

My heart hurts and I’m angry. The Southern religious litany that makes reasons for unreasonable tragedies is too much for me to hear right now. All that “God’s plan” and “gone to a better place” business only makes it worse. I need to avoid all my Fundamentalist friends for a while – at least until I get to one of those other stages of grief.