The real me.

This is a hard one to write. I'm not all that good at being real about anything least of all about myself. Friends and family expect a quip for every query, an irreverent aside for every serious conversation.

But the past few weeks have found me short-tempered and angry. I've snapped at supervisors and subordinates. I've been surly at home and sour with friends. Some might say I haven't been myself lately. But it's just not true.

This is me, the real me.

I'm angry beyond words and on the verge of tears almost constantly. I can hardly wait for Sept. 11 to roll around so the media will go back to pretending Hurricane Katrina is old news.

I don't know if I ever posted on this before taking the stuff down in February. I don't think I did. It's just too personal.

I spent several weeks in Southern Mississippi last fall. I was supposed to be there as a reporter, but spent most of my days doing relief work and wrote about it at night. My editors were upset with me and I almost lost my job because of it. (Truth be told, my attitude then left an impression on my bosses that I was insubordinate and didn't respect their authority. They mentioned this during the unemployment hearings that followed my dismissal in February.) It was one of the saddest experiences of my life, watching the poorest people in the country thank people for the smallest of kindness.

Fortunately, I was too busy to dwell on it, too overworked to cry about it, too drained to think about it. The act of filing a story each morning at 6 a.m. somehow put a period on the previous day, closed my memory from remembering.

One night while sitting around drinking lukewarm beer with some relief workers, I heard a scream from nearby. I dropped the beer and ran toward the sound. Another relief worker, a Mexican guy, had been adjusting the hitch for his equipment trailer when the cement block it was resting on gave way. The heavy trailer, complete with a portable cutting torch and several dozen gas tanks, had tipped onto the man's right foot.

We managed to raise the trailer using a two-ton hydraulic jack that we had brought along from Illinois. I asked — OK, I told — one of the people standing around watching to go get someone from the medical clinic set up in the compound. There was considerable blood, but no bones seemed to be broken.

One of the doctors and a med student came and examined the Mexican's foot. The doctor closed the wound with some butterfly bandages and told me to take the guy to the hospital in Waveland — a town 18 miles east of us.

The Mexican, Juan Something, didn't want to go but I made him get into the truck. Thinking his reluctance came from a lack of medical insurance, I explained that the hospital was providing emergency care for free. (A lie that turned out to be true.)

What really troubled Juan were the National Guard checkpoints along U.S. 90 between Pearlington and Gulfport. Every ten miles or so, a roadblock was set-up every night from 8 p.m. until 5 a.m. From midnight until 4 a.m., non-government vehicles were prohibited from travel along the highway. Juan was worried that some soldier might ask for documentation from him. They might have otherwise, but by then the Guardsmen were used to seeing my truck. My press pass gave me extraordinary access.

(With the exception of NASA Stennis Space Center, I was never denied entrance anywhere. For several months after the hurricane, the NASA base was closed to non-governmental employees-- FEMA was staging out of there, as were several security and firefighting units. But a doctor at one of the volunteer clinics told me that if I flipped a stethoscope behind my neck like an ER doc, they'd let me through. A trick that worked, it was as close to playing doctor as I ever got down there.)

Juan was lucky. The hospital -- a circus like tent set-up in a parking lot of a destroyed K-Mart -- found no broken bones. They cleaned the wound, put a couple of stitches in to close it, and told the guy that God had been looking out for him because the cheap boots he wore had miraculously saved his foot.

I haven't thought of Juan since then, but he and other people I met down there are now like a cast of characters in a play that only I can see.

I'm angry because I feel like I've abandoned these people.

I went along with the rest of my profession. My next big story was on Dennis Hastert's ties to Abramoff. Then I co-wrote a series about an Illinois judge allegedly trading sexual favors from jail inmates for reduced sentences in court.

(I wrote a scathing criticism here about the newspaper's support of all things Reagan and Republican. ((If you check out the Web site for my old papers you can buy a limited edition bronze of Reagan riding a horse.)) This of course was the catalyst to my being fired.)

I moved on. I let my words from then speak for me and I let it all go. And now all I see and hear is New Orleans, New Orleans, New Orleans. The media and administration have either colluded to ignore or just plain forgotten the poor people outside of New Orleans affected by the hurricane. It makes for a much neater story when the only poor people are black folks from the Big Easy. Given all that we've heard about the murder rates in black neighborhoods there before, during and after the storm, it's not hard for Americans to harden their hearts and ignore them. They're the Willie Horton's of modern politics. They represent all that racism and conservatism rely on to reinforce the notion that success for Black people is available for those who aren't too lazy or too dangerous to take it.

"It's not my fault those Blacks can't get ahead. Even Juan Williams from Fox News knows they're killing each other."

I met plenty of minorities in Mississippi. There were the volunteers from Philadelphia (Penn.) who ran the shelter in Pearlington until white people from the Red Cross showed up in late October. (The Red Cross took over the shelter, put up a sign claiming ownership of the services that had been provided by volunteers not in any way affiliated with the group, and then proceeded to kick everyone out of the shelter. The folks of Pearlington were moved from the only building left standing in the tiny village and plopped down in a FEMA park 20 miles away where many still live.) (The Red Cross "volunteer" who ran the shelter for less than a week before it closed later got in trouble for using relief funds for his own benefit.)

[I CAN'T BELIEVE HOW MUCH I'M REMEMBERING AND RAMBLING. I THINK MAYBE I NEED TO STOP NOW AND FIGURE OUT HOW TO TELL THIS STORY IN A LINEAR WAY. IT HASN'T HELPED WITH MY EMOTIONS, ONLY GIVEN ME MORE MEMORIES TO MAKE ME ANGRY.]