Welcome to Hurricane Season

For most people in the U.S. Memorial Day Weekend represents the official beginning of summer, the time when the last vestiges of spring bloom leads to the music, picnics, parties and playfulness of vacation time. It's a party weekend when most people give a cursory nod to honor those who have died for our collective sins but then turn again to another hot dog, another beer and another hose shoe clanging against a metal post. This used to be the way I thought of Memorial Day Weekend (well, that and the fact that it was always the weekend when gas prices went up), the time just before the end of school when you had the first taste of vacation time to come.

Not so much anymore... Last Monday I woke up thinking of the impending start of the Atlantic Hurricane Season (which officially started yesterday, on June 1). I don't mean that I didn't party with some other folks, because I did. It's just that the one thing that kept rising up in the back of my mind was that we were starting the third hurricane season since Katrina. From now until Thanksgiving I will check The Weather Channel, National Weather Service, and National Hurricane Center on an almost daily basis. When there are storms brewing I'll be checking every hour and become nearly obsessed with watching the progress of storms and anticipating where and when they will hit land and/or move safely out to sea. I will keep the hurricane report on my RSS feeds.

This has been my routine from June through November for the last two years. Whether in New Orleans, or safely ensconced in Northern California I have watched, worried, prayed and fretted for six months each year concerned not only for friends in The Crescent City, but friends and family in Florida, and people I don't know in places like Jamaica, Cuba, or the Yucatan.

This year both the temporal and the geographic windows of this worrisome voyeurism have been expanded. With the recent disaster in Myanmar I have had to face full on the realization that we indeed are all connected on this little planet. A number of people have made statements of dismissal regarding these horrible incidents and the less than stellar response of the respective goevernment agencies, but I think it's pretty important to remember that the current administration in this country is also guilty of slow response, of refusing help from foreign countries, and of being thoroughly unprepared for something they knew would happen sooner or lateer under even the best of circumstances.

The fact of the matter is that most of us live on our own small portion of a very tenuous little rock that is hurtling through space at mind-boggling speeds. At any given moment, on pretty much any spot on the planet, something catastrophic is waiting to happen. We cover our eyes, cross our fingers, say our prayers and hope for the best. In the meantime, we laugh and sing and dance; we eat, and drink, and play. Someone might be inclined to suggest that human existence is, and always has been, lived in the midst of varying levels of denial... and we probably do. But if we can also acknowledge that we are all vulnerable to disaster, and that we are all capable of helping someone else, perhaps we really can make it through another half lap around the sun more or less intact.

That's what I'm counting on... Welcome to Hurricane Season.