Like Heaven and Hell

It's is sort of like heaven and hell. You know, sitting there at the table with the family. Mom, dad, sister, uncles and aunts. All of us sitting around this massive feast of food that none of us will ever be able to complete. Its not like mom would even allow left overs in the fridge anyway. She'll just throw all the food out. You know I never realized how good I had it until I went to New Orleans to help with the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

It was hell out there. It stank of blood, death, and water. You know we usually think of water as being clean, but when it hits something dirty, or dying it stinks. Water can stink worse than you can imagine. The same water that you use to wash with, cant wash away some things. I don’t even know where to begin, how do I describe the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. What happen to those people just wasn’t right. I'm not one for politics, but all I know is that’s not how people are supposed to live in the United States. The Tv didn’t even scratch the surface. I never went inside the super dome, but I heard the stories. The worst of nature seems to bring out the worst of man.

People did what they could to survive, who was helping them? It seemed like even God turned his back on New Orleans. The cops were shooting unarmed civilians, even the mentally ill where at risk of being killed by the police. It seemed like whatever the water didn’t wash away, the police where there to clean up.

Whats even worse, the city was in need before the water came, the water just washed away all the glitz and glam of New Orleans and showed what was really going on. It laid everything out in the sun. The world saw the weakest and poorest of America. The hungry, the tired, and huddled masses on roof tops begging for help from the American government. People died of hunger, people died of exhaustion, people just died. And for the ones that weren’t so fortunate as to die, the rest were left homeless jobless, broke but still in debt.

And here I am sitting here in a house big enough to comfortably fit five families with enough food to feed at least fifty people. This would be heaven. But for me its just another extension of hell. Its worse than hell. To see your own family as evil, to see your own blessing as a curse. Why do we deserve to live the way we do, while others doesn’t even have a clean shirt to put on? What makes us any better than all those people that drowned?

Has my family even given a dime to help out. Do they even care? It is people like my family that make the poor hate the rich so much. We live in a heaven like state unaware that so many are without and are suffering, they are suffering for unknown and invisible sins.

What makes me worthy of eating this food? What makes the trash can worthy of receiving the food left over from tonight's thanksgiving celebration? Is this really showing thanks? Stuffing our faces until we pass out, while others pass out from hunger.

I got up from my seat abruptly, it shook most of the table. The whole family looked at me wildly. I could see my ever stern father looking at me as if I was from another planet. “Go to hell, all of you!.”