My heart goes out to everyone in New Orleans. Those who are surviving somehow. Those who are helping out their fellow people. And also to those who are surviving via means that they’d be ashamed of normally. Given the crisis, and given that people are trapped and can’t purchase supplies even if they have the money to do so, I fall into the mindset of “looting for food and water, and heck, maybe even beer: okay; looting for DVDs and various levels of bling: not okay.”
The fact that the poor and the auto-free were in many cases simply trapped in N.O. is awful (the Greyhound Station closed on Saturday!?!).
The reports of guns and violence, and suicides and rapes in the stadium bathrooms are horrifying.
Most of us like to think that people band together in a crisis. I still believe most do–especially when they have something to do (e.g help others around them). But when you simply lock 20,000 people in a stadium, with nothing to focus on but their troubles, with insufficient supplies, no resources for hygiene, and a lack of “staff” to organize things, disaster is going to happen on some level.
On a more positive note, the live updates from a bunch of folks who are keeping their ISP afloat in New Orleans via a generator remind me of those early days of the current war, when the US first invaded Iraq, when everyone was tuned into Salam Pax’s website,* to find out what it was like on the ground. Yes, yes: I realize the two situations are very, very different. But the Internets just give us this ground-level view that we never had before.**
*This is the new version of the site. I believe the old one was stamped out by censors. But I could have that wrong.
**Well… okay, technically we still don’t have the ground-level view. (Note to cultural theorists: it’s like Gayatri Spivak’s idea that “the subaltern cannot speak.” When the subaltern speaks, you know s/he isn’t really the subaltern.) I mean, digital divide and all, what we have is not the view of the have-nots, but the “creative geek’s ground-level view.” But it’s a nice addition to the major media outlets to be sure.
2 comments ↓
Nice post. It sickens me some of the inhumanity towards man at the worst possible time. Every time something like this happens, I think we take a step backwards.
It’s frightening, isn’t it? But it’s also a reminder to me of how people can’t be human while virtually none of the most basic of human needs — safety, shelter, food, water–being met.
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