I remember when Katrina hit. I remember sitting in my second grade classroom on the ground floor, where the first graders usually lived. In the corner, mounted to the ceiling, was a little black box of a TV, and when Katrina hit, my teacher never turned it off. For the next few months — and maybe for the whole year — the hours of news footage I had watched out of the corner of my eye stayed vibrant in my mind. I saw the floods again, the pain again, the sorrow again every time I went into the school office and saw boxes full of donations, every time I walked into the school library and saw the containers asking for money to help the children of New Orleans rebuild theirs. I'd lived through many a tornado, but I knew that what we were talking about now was something so much larger than that. I remember when Katrina hit, and I remember how terrible it all was. I remember when Sandy hit. It was in my freshman year, and there were days of solid rain even angrier than Pennsylvania usually has. I remember when the news stopped calling it a ‘tropical storm’ and started calling it a full-blown hurricane, and I messaged my friends in York to see if they were okay because neighborhoods even that far from the coast had flooded. That first Sunday, we barely had enough men to pass the sacrament because so many people in my congregation had driven to New Jersey to don yellow Mormon Helping Hands vests and aid the victims in their clean up and repair. I remember when Sandy hit, because my life became a part of it. And now I’m going to remember when Harvey hit. I’ll remember the texts from my aunt, whose son shares a name with this most recent weather tantrum, saving newspapers of the disaster. I’ll remember my mom, who served her eighteen-month mission in Houston, keeping college-sophomore-me in the loop about how she watched the live reports with guilty enthusiasm. And I’ll remember everything I saw that refused to accept that maybe this had something to do with the world’s climate changing, breaking the standards of our global weather, beating us back for the destruction we’ve so selfishly gifted this planet. And I’ll remember everything that refused to help. Because what a planet really should be about is its unity. It should be about the fact that we are, quite literally, all in this together. No country, no city, no person should be exempt from our concern and our care. And we should not just express our pity and our sadness, we should do something about it, we should act. And even if all that you are financially and locationally capable of doing is pressing others to donate, pressing others to help with disaster relief, then you are producing aid. We should not and simply cannot afford to be selfish. Human beings, as our own flesh and blood and molecular makeup, do not deserve selfishness. They do not deserve to be ignored. They do not deserve to be forgotten.
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I'm Audrey, a college student and existential rambler.
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February 2021
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