It can all seem so… pointless… at a time like this. When faced with so much pain. So much death.

It’s like a veil has been cast back and we can see – clearly for a moment – how things really are – and it fills our hearts with sorrow and dread. That veil will soon be placed back. Things will flow to back to ‘normal’ (what ever that is) for most of us. But before that happens many will take stock.

At times like this, especially a times like this, along with grieving, along with sharing – many feel an overwhelming need to reach out and do something – taking our horror and doing something with it – shape it – mold it – redirect it – try and do some good with it.

The dimensions of that are different counting upon who we are – and what we do. For artists and musicians, some attempt to record it and relate meaning. For pundits and analysts, well it’s in the truth telling. For others, tool builders and engineers, it’s in building solutions to cope with the the aftermath and the future. For many it is in direct volunteering and fund raising. For some it is reaching out to family members, some we’ve pushed away for years. For others, it is simply in telling those we love – we love them. And maybe a few strangers too.

Not all folks are like this – you know the ones – who even now seem oblivious. Maybe you are jeallous of them to a degree. Cognitive dissonance, willful ignorance, whatever you want to call it, these folks are not demonstratably moved and are just going about their business.

One of the questions many of us are talking about is what we are doing online. Billmon at Whisky Bar in “Hitting the Wall” shares he’s planning to take a break for a bit – and it is understandable why:

…last night I came across an account of the search for real bodies — not metaphorical ones — in the stinking ruins of New Orleans. It’s like something out of the charnel houses of World War II

…It is reported that the state of Louisiana has placed an order for 25,000 body bags.

For some reason, it wasn’t until I read that story that the full horror of what happened in New Orleans finally hit home for me. Maybe it’s because I was on the road part of last week, and missed most of the live broadcasts during the days when the city was in complete chaos. Maybe it’s because I don’t watch TV much even when I am home. But until now I’ve thought about the catastrophe more in terms of the loss of a great American city — and less in terms of the individual human lives that were destroyed.

No longer. The image — of a man frantically trying to breath through a pipe stuck in a ventilator grate as the waters rise over his head — is too searingly to hold at an emotional distance. How long did he survive, submerged in total darkness? And how many others died in the same bizarre trap — too weak or terrified to break through the layers of plywood and asphalt that had suddenly become the lids on their underwater coffins?

Thinking about those deaths is like looking at pictures of people jumping, hand in hand, from the windows of the World Trade Center on 9/11 — forced in a moment of howling panic to choose between the flames and the long fall to the pavement below. Such images are unendurable. The mind recoils from them as if we ourselves were caught in the same trap.

And suddenly all the backbiting over who failed first — or most often, or most spectacularly — seems too vile to worry about, much less write about. Even the big, important questions — the future of New Orleans, the threat of global warming, the paralyzing problems of race and poverty in America — have lost their intellectual appeal. Too many people have died, and too much has been destroyed to try to make sense of it now. And as stupid and obnoxious and insane as the powers that be have been this past week, they don’t seem very funny now — not even Dick Cheney.

I need a break, in other words — time to simply grieve for New Orleans and its dead, and for their lost world, now slipping into history. Which means I may not be posting much for the next few days.