My heart goes out to all the people in Central Florida who have been affected by the recent tornadoes.

Growing up in Southeast Nebraska I've seen my share of twister damage and there is nothing in nature that can comapre to it, unless the sea itself were to wash the land with oblivion.

My home town of Beatrice was struck by a trio of twisters less then a year after my family and I had moved to Lincoln (the capital). Damage was, thankfully, rather light concidering, but I remember drving franticly back to see if my best friend was unhurt (the phones were out) and finding the red brick steeple of the Catholic church totally thrown down and wreckage and debri littering the streets.

I remember the nights when my parents would wake me up in the small hours, wrap me in a quilt and bundle me down to the basement amid the ommonous howl of the warning sirens. The guy on the em-radio would droll calmy on about the progess of this thing which could conceivably tear our little home straight from it's foundations, but the all-clear would sound and the sirens stop as it pettered out into air or ambled off into the distance.

The wreckage caused by a tornado is like nothing else. There's no contest or 'degrees' when it comes to human suffering, but the sight of a home, or familiar building, totally wrenched beam-from-beam is a horrifying, humbling experiance.

And yet people move on. They sift the wreckage and carry on with their lives.
I'm not sure I could.

So I urge everyone who knows anyone in the area, or if you care about the suffering of others, to take part in whatever releif drives are in your area, or donate to the Red Cross so that disaters like these can have a happy ending.

D.O.P.R