I've been at odds whether to write a post about New Orleans. A lot of posts on the subject seem excessively self-indulgent or pseudo-intellectual. I'm not sure what I could say that might not come across as one, the other, or both. My thoughts are not particularly original, well-grounded, or profound. But sometimes the art is in the process and not the product. So here's the partial collection of my scattered thoughts:

It usually takes two or three days for large-scale events to hit me. 9/11 didn't hit me - really hit me - until I was on my way back from a trip brief Waco trip. The tsumani took a couple days as well. Prior to that point, most of my thoughts are hypothetical, distant, cold, and possibly inappropriate.

But it's starting to get through. A little ahead of schedule, if for no other reason than the entire thing being somewhat inescapable due to Camille's ties to the city. Also because of literary comparisons.

What strikes me most about this whole thing is how close we are to anarchy. One week ago, New Orleans was a normal city. Since then, it's sunk in to chaos. It took a massive hurricane a couple snaps in the levee, but it only took a few days. And poof, society was gone.

A few years ago DC's Batman titles had a story arch called 'No Man's Land' in which Gotham is abandoned by the federal government, leaving martial law abound. Take out the masks, remove earthquake rubble and add a bunch of water, and the parallels are somewhat interesting. Denny O'Neill, whom I believe was the architect of NML, was also the cheif writer of a series in the 80's called The Question, which over a three year run followed Hub City's descent in to utter chaos.

Gotham and Hub City are, of course, fictional. While stories that feature superheroes are inherently unreal in nature, even accepting that the stories never felt real. They felt metaphorical. They felt hypothetical. But they're not all that different from what is going on right now. It's taking me a while to come to grips with that.

We take things for granted in this country. We take for granted that whatever corruption may exist in government generally and law enforcement specifically that there are laws that we live by. A lot of people get away with a lot of things, of course, but they do so mostly by being sly, tricky, and quiet. The mere requirement that such actions be kept covert (or at least not chargable or provable in court) keeps corruption, on the greater scheme of things, to a minimum.

When we read about Sudanese warlords or armed struggle in Iraq, there is a certain distance we place between ourselves and those events. That's over there, but over here we have Rule of Law and protections both against evildoers and against or protectors. The system may fail, but at least there is a system.

So what's getting me most about New Orleans right now is the utter lack of a system. Not just the chaos, which we've seen before, but the fact that there is no immediate end in sight. There's not a feeling right now that folks out there can just "wait it out." It's the difference between holding your breath to get the ring under water and being stuck under water, not knowing which way us up, and panicking. The light at the end of the tunnel and the knowledge of how it will play out is all-important. And that's what's lacking now.

People are having to leave their beloved pets to die. They have nothing to drink. Nothing to eat. When something bad happens, there is no one to go to and nowhere to escape to. You know you could be killed and there is nothing anyone can do about it. You know anyone around you can be killed and there isn't anything you can do about that. Eventually, I suppose, the busses will take everyone off to Houston, but dammit we're in America and we shouldn't ever find ourselves in this situation. Ever.

But there are, the lesson to me in this, limits to what a society can safeguard. There are limits to what a society can guarantee to its people at all times. Sometimes we're thrown such a curveball that the unthinkable becomes the pragmatic. The dichotomy of chaos and martial law suddenly becomes one that we have to ponder. Whatever chance we might have had to preserve the civility is gone. Whatever notion we had that we, as Americans, were different from those other people from those other places, or that we, as humans, are capable consistently keeping peace without bouts of chaos or a lot of broken glass, becomes much, much harder to maintain.