Inconvenient Truth

I ran across a picture that starkly contrasts the aftermath of the Jackson tornado.

This is before:


This is after:


It's hard to get a very good idea of what something should look like from piles of rubble. And even though I lived there for 4 years, until I saw the "before" picture, I couldn't quite get an honest estimate of the extent of damage.

Classes started back today, just 14 days after they were suspended. And they've completed the entire demolition of both housing complexes that were hit the hardest (80% of on-campus housing). And that's after they visited each room or what was left of it multiple to time to retrieve any personal items that might still be intact.

I have some long-standing gripes with the University because of its fostering of religious, political and social insularity. In many ways, that's the exact opposite of what I believe to goals of a liberal arts university should be: to expand and engage the mind to see beyond the narrow, homogenous world that most people grow up with.

Still, I'm nostalgic about my time there. Most of us are about our youth on one level or another. And a little part of my past is gone, at least physically. It's not like I have ever had plans to go back and visit. But now I don't have the opportunity to do so if I changed my mind.

Human's are weird, unpredictable and inexplicable. I am no different, and like most people, most of the time I don't really know why one thing moves me while another does not. All I know is that some things do and some things don't.

This one has, and not just because my niece was affected. It goes much deeper than that. Even though my memories of the place tend to lean to the negative, I have a profound sadness about the whole thing.

It is an inconvenient truth for which I have no explanation. So for now, I'm chalking it up to nostalgia for a time when I was younger, a time when I was just beginning to explore life outside of the narrow walls I had grown up in.

And now that I've explored it more thoroughly than I ever planned, maybe I just want a simpler time. Not that the things were simpler back then, but maybe I was.