There’s on old somewhat sick joke about tornados and their effect on poor southern and midwestern communities.
Q. What do an Alabama divorce and a tornado have in common?
A. Somebody’s going to lose a trailer.
When we moved from California to Georgia late in 2010, I noticed that two miles or so to the west of our gated community were two different types of poor homes. One was tiny rundown homes and the other was a mobile home park. Both looked truly sad.
Then I started thinking about something. These homes that looked so pathetic might have been a step up from homelessness or living in a shelter for some of these people. It’s possible that what I saw as a crummy house might have been the nicest place some of these people had ever had.
Or it might have been the first step back for people rebuilding their lives after some sort of personal disaster or tragedy.
Regardless of whether you’re living in a trailer park or in a Manhattan high rise, home is home and losing your home is a terrible thing. That’s what makes the disaster that hit the town of Rolling Fork, Mississippi so awful.
Rolling Fork was a delta town of about 2,000 people before tornados hit this week.
Now it’s essentially gone.
“My city is gone,” Rolling Fork Mayor Eldridge Walker told CNN.
For a town you’ve probably never heard of, Rolling Fork has some interesting connections. Blues singer Muddy Waters said he was born there, and President Theodore Roosevelt went on a famous bear hunt in the surrounding county in 1902.
You can see from the map of Rolling Fork pre-tornado that there wasn’t a whole lot of there there. No national or regional fast food outlets and only two places to buy groceries, DG Market and Family Dollar. The town was 80 percent African-American and 21 percent below the poverty line.
It’s difficult to imagine what the people who lived there will do.
Photos of the devastation will tell you it’s not just a matter of repairing buildings that were damaged in the storms. The buildings no longer exist.
The men in the picture are looking for only one thing — people trapped in the wreckage who are still alive.
And the woman in the picture below is looking at the trailer park where her mother lived.
You don’t see any mobile homes?
Guess what.
They no longer exist.
Looking at these pictures makes me furious. Furious that 2,000 people essentially have had their lives destroyed and the only help will come from the government. I would be willing to bet that some billionaire will spend more money on some ridiculous adventure that will cost more than it would take to rebuild this entire town better than it was before.
Some other rich idiot will donate massive amounts of money to lobbyists in support of some issue that will make him even richer.
Anyone who calls himself or herself a Christian and doesn’t believe we are our brother’s keeper doesn’t worship the Jesus Christ of the Bible. If you remember that guy, he was the one who said anyone who wanted to follow him should give all their wealth to the poor.
Rolling Fork is a pretty good metaphor for America, folks.
Our country is dying.