Trenton, Ga., resident Loretta Blevins witnessed a shocking surprise when she looked out her kitchen window seven days ago. The family's doghouse was flying through the air with their dog inside it, the Wizard of Oz come darkly to life.
Fortunately, the pet survived unscathed, a rare happy ending in what has become an overwhelming nightmare of heartache for too many in the Tennessee Valley, northwestern Georgia and far too much of Alabama.
It doesn't seem like seven days, of course. If your home or business was blown to toothpicks, it probably already seems like seven years. For the more fortunate among us, it seems like yesterday, the tornado sirens blaring every few minutes as we fled to basements, under stairs or to any other spot deemed capable of protecting us from 150 mph (or more) winds.
I'll never forget huddling with my wife and children in our basement last Wednesday evening, our battery-powered radio tuned to a weather update from Channel 3 meteorologist Paul Barys, who said, "This could be the mother of all storms. It should hit Trenton in four minutes; Lookout Mountain, Georgia, in 11 minutes; downtown Chattanooga in 13 minutes."
Cruelly on cue, it did. Then the night got even worse roughly two hours later, the nastiest cell of all blowing apart Ringgold and Apison.
To wake up Thursday morning was to discover a South that looked in too many locales as if, in one victim's words, "an atomic bomb hit us."
Said University of Tennessee at Chattanooga football coach Russ Huesman on Tuesday: "The destruction is just hard to fathom. We have a player coming in from Tuscaloosa next year, Toyvian Brand. He lives in a trailer, and as soon as we realized what happened there we started trying to get in touch with him. It was scary for a while, but we finally got him, and he and his family are fine. But there are so many people out there who aren't fine right now."
It was all enough to make Lady Mocs assistant basketball coach Mike Murray begin scouring Facebook on Friday, looking for a place where he could help.
"After an hour or so it seemed like Flintstone (Ga.) could really use some volunteers," he said. "So Saturday morning I got up early, stopped and bought a pair of work gloves at Ace Hardware and headed that way."
When he arrived, a state trooper directed him to a church, where he quickly was pointed toward several homes with downed trees and debris.
"I cleared some trees, helped put some tarps on some roofs," Murray said. "Hopefully I helped a little."
We all want to help a lot. And gifts of food, clothing, money and time are all needed and appreciated. But we're talking billions of dollars here. We're talking years of reconstruction.
And as any victim of Katrina will tell you, the world moves on.The national news already has shifted focus to the demise of Osama bin Laden, a justifiable and understandable move given both the joy and sense of closure the death of Public Enemy No. 1 has brought to a United States in desperate need of healing a nearly 10-year-old open wound.
But celebrating a madman's end needn't dull our desire to repair the South. Or the flood-swollen Midwest. Or the charred Southwest.
(Throw in Japan, last year's oil spill and this winter's blizzards and is it any wonder the entire country, if not the whole world, is beginning to buckle under disaster fatigue?)
So here's one solution: Begin a national campaign labeled Credit for Caring. For every dollar you donate up to $1,000, 50 percent becomes a tax credit on that year's taxes. Not a deduction, a credit. So if you donate $100, you get a $50 break on federal taxes you owe; $1,000 gets you $500 off; anything over $1,000 is treated under the same deduction laws it always has been, since anyone able to give that much probably can get by with a deduction.
You could be encouraged to give it at the local level, the donation being logged into a national computer bank for Internal Revenue Service purposes. Or you could give to a national fund if your general region has been spared a disaster.
And Credit for Caring needs to begin immediately, if not sooner, while these catastrophes are fresh in our minds. Let Congress and President Obama swiftly approve it for the public good. Let anyone who takes unfair advantage of it as a contributor, administrator or recipient go to jail.
Is this a sports column? Not really. But this is far bigger than sports, as witness Auburn fans and athletes reaching out to help Alabama's campus home in Tuscaloosa this past weekend.
More important, a concept such as Credit for Caring could give a sporting chance to the less fortunate and least lucky among us to rebuild their lives, their homes and their communities to what they were eight days ago, before they were hit by nature's atomic bomb.