I'm old enough to help. I know enough about the world to know that I have to help. But I'm too far away to do anything in person and I don't have any money to send.
They say that a disaster is never real until it happens to you and they're bloody well right. In 2001 I was in Alaska, which is more or less a foreign country, and I was too immature to understand or react to the situation. The Tsunami was too damned far away for me to understand until well after the fact. Now something has happened in my back yard and I very much want to help, but I don't know how.
In my mind this is far worse than 9/11. New Orleans has a listed population of half a million people. As far as I know most of those people are now refugees going I don't know where around the United States. All those people don't have jobs or homes and they probably don't have any resources beyond a very small amount of money and some negligible portable goods.
It doesn't seem like the nation is snapping to attention to deal with this. After 9/11 there were flags everywhere and everyone was emotional and there was all this patriotism and now, here, there isn't anything. It's like people just aren't reacting yet. I don't know. It's fucked. I'm going to try to do whatever I can in my area, even if that's just volunteering at the local soup kitchen so the Red Cross can free up it's more experienced personel.
They say that a disaster is never real until it happens to you and they're bloody well right. In 2001 I was in Alaska, which is more or less a foreign country, and I was too immature to understand or react to the situation. The Tsunami was too damned far away for me to understand until well after the fact. Now something has happened in my back yard and I very much want to help, but I don't know how.
In my mind this is far worse than 9/11. New Orleans has a listed population of half a million people. As far as I know most of those people are now refugees going I don't know where around the United States. All those people don't have jobs or homes and they probably don't have any resources beyond a very small amount of money and some negligible portable goods.
It doesn't seem like the nation is snapping to attention to deal with this. After 9/11 there were flags everywhere and everyone was emotional and there was all this patriotism and now, here, there isn't anything. It's like people just aren't reacting yet. I don't know. It's fucked. I'm going to try to do whatever I can in my area, even if that's just volunteering at the local soup kitchen so the Red Cross can free up it's more experienced personel.
VIEW 3 of 3 COMMENTS
aaardvark:
Hey, Sarah doesn't need help moving and she won't be at her place when you want to be there, so, um, give her a call, because she lost your number.
absintheofmalice:
Yeah, we left on the Thursday before the hurricane. The storm was predicted to head that way, but the people we talked to weren't worried. They said they'd heard a lot of warnings in the past and nothing had ever happened. We tried to go to some of the websites for the people we met (people who run the tours and a few shop owners), but none of the sites are up. This is terrible, but never even had to happen. If the levees were repaired the flooding could have been avoided. 