Dusty Nix: Reflection and denial in the calm after the storm

Cleaning up a spilled bag of rice, while people not so far away are cleaning up the rubble of their homes and lives, should not be cause for much annoyance. Perspective and context matter, and there was an absurd and, I devoutly hope, momentary lapse of both on my part Thursday night as I busied myself at the kitchen stove.

Maybe it’s unforgivably self-absorbed to take dutiful note of suffering all around and then turn back as quickly as possible to the mundane minutiae of life; maybe it’s just human.

Whichever it is -- and maybe the moral and psychological truth lies somewhere in between -- the fact is that Wednesday night’s storms blew past and left no worse devastation for us than a wet driveway. And just a few hours later, I was griping childishly as hundreds of families a lot like ours were preparing to bury their dead.

(The worst thing we endured, other than anxiety, was the utter uselessness of The Weather Channel. During the region’s worst storm crisis in 40 years TWC, with basically one job to do, somehow managed against all odds to avoid pretty much every item of useful or necessary information. With swarms of tornadoes headed toward us, some guy with a cute little electronic pen that made a cute little blue arrow appear on his cute little TV monitor babbled about “rotation” and showed us graphic simulations of thunderclouds. Could you please show the radar map? Where are the storms now? Which way are they headed? How fast? What’s in the path? Who cares? Watch our cool little blue arrow. As failure in the clutch goes, it was epic.)

I went into the darkened living room where I could at least watch the weather itself. What had already happened was of no immediate use to us, and what was going to happen was of no apparent interest to The Weather Channel, so I might as well see what was happening right then.

(Footnote: My family later switched over to the local news stations, whose coverage of the storms was superb. Would you folks send some video to Atlanta and show them how to do it right?)

From the living room there was a pretty good long-distance view of the violent stuff going on to the north and east, but no real sense of the devastation those distant flickers and rumbles represented. By about midnight, what felt like just another springtime storm scare had pretty much passed, and we were already moving back into life’s familiar rhythms.

The full horror of what had happened was apparent Thursday morning: Whole neighborhoods, whole families, in some cases whole towns, had been obliterated. Countless people who had gone to bed in what they thought was the security of home were now homeless, wandering once-familiar streets in a shell-shocked daze.

Most of us can’t imagine it, even though at some level we know we might one day have to. Our neighbors around Warm Springs don’t have to imagine it. Thousands of others would like to forget it, and never will.

Meanwhile, most of us soon go back to the reassuring illusion of security and comfort. Maybe there’s an emotional and psychological necessity, or at least justification, for that kind of denial: The closer to home the tragedy, the more we try to distance ourselves from it.

All around us are people who don’t have that luxury. They need our prayers, and maybe some of us need their forgiveness.

This story was originally published May 1, 2011 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Dusty Nix: Reflection and denial in the calm after the storm."