Reflections on Mississippi

My time in Biloxi these past few days gave me a lot to ponder.

For one thing, I made just enough of a visceral connection with the damage from Katrina--yes, even all this time later--that I now realize that despite all the news reports, those of us not there had absolutely no clue just how very bad it really was. I suppose that's always the case, but now I'm angrier than ever at the way we as a country failed the people who suffered from the hurricane. No one whined, mind you, not a single person, but each person from the area had a tale of damage and loss and pain, and I found some of the conversations with smiling and resilient people to be absolutely heartrending.

Walking along the Gulf of Mexico was another powerful experience. I grew up believing that St. Pete and its beaches and even all of Florida was the most wonderful place one could live, and then the wonder faded and ultimately vanished in the face of construction and commercialism. I suppose it's inevitable--to paraphrase a line from a John Kessel story, money always flows down to the water--but it still saddens me. Walking on the white-sand beach, staring at the shimmering, calm water, I regained for a brief time that love of the place of my youth, and I'm very grateful that I did.

Finally, I also relearned that for all the differences many folks in the SF community appear to have--from politics to writing goals to cover design, the list of points of argument are many and varied and heated--when you for a minute ignore those and just listen and talk, you realize how much all of us love the genre and its possibilities. That's a very good and powerful thing, and I do wish we'd all keep it in mind more often and use it to temper the attacks on various SF sub-communities that are all too common in our field.