Hurricane Katrina: Blog for Relief Day - September 1
OK, lets kick blog butt today, September 1st (well, I'm posting the night before because of schedul foo), for Hurricane Katrina folks. A lot of us have been seeking ways to help, but cash always hits the spot. Let's make a one day pump of infusion to the Gulf Coast. If you have a blog, first give, then jump in and pass the meme along.
I'm going with the generic suggestion; I'll give to the American Red Cross, but if you are so moved, check out all the other charities on Instapundit's ever-updated list. If you want other action items, scroll to some of my earlier posts. The
For the blog aggregator page for the day, go to TLB.
flood_aid, hurricane+katrina, katrina,
posted by Nancy White at 8:30 PM
5 Comments:
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Hurricane Relief: Too Little Too Late
Our government at work after 4 years of Homeland Security preparedness http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9162009/site/newsweek/
Its time for our National Leadership to speak out regarding the lack of timely response on behalf of our Federal Govt in the South. Many thousands of American lives will be lost in the next few days alone if the situation in the south is not brought under control immediately. On Tuesday, our President was in California shaking hands, rather than taking command of the situation in the Southern States, a situation, which by all predictions on Sunday and Monday, could easily end up with the loss of tens of thousands of lives. Our President did not put National guard troops into action or mobilize Navy relief efforts until Wednesday (by all accounts five days late), by the time those shamefully modest resources get into place, fully one week will have passed, any many people will be dead.
Our Nation has had four years to prepare for such an event as Hurricane Katrina,with billions spent on FEMA, the Homeland Security Dept. and NorthCom, and yet the response to the situation is woefully tardy, and woefully indequate. I call on all Americans to speak with one voice and demand the Federal Government triple the troops (30,000 is nowhere near enough) and resources sent to the area immediately. Minuites are precious, and our American brothers and sisters are dying needlessly of starvation and dehydration. Food and water should be being airdropped into unreachable areas, as we did in Afghanistan and Iraq, but they're not. Hundreds of Military Helicopters should be being used to tranport the thousnds of people caught on rooftops, but as of Thursday, only FOUR helicopters were being used in search and rescue in the whole city of New Orleans, and those were being shot at. Civilian helicopter operators should be being recruited to help with airlifts, but they are not. Thousands of Coast Guard Reserves Nationwide should be being called up, but so far only five hundred have. Amphibious assault vehicles should be ebing used to get to the neighborhoods tht have not been reached yet, but they are not. The FEMA holding camps that are set up at military bases around the US, and that re capable of holding up to three million people collectively, should be being readied to hold refugees, but they are not. American Babies are dying in their mother's arms while our government lumbers into action like a herd of bedraggled, apathetic snails.
“This is a national disgrace,” said Terry Ebbert, head of New Orleans’ emergency operations. “FEMA has been here three days, yet there is no command and control,” Ebbert said. “We can send massive amounts of aid to tsunami victims but we can’t bail out the city of New Orleans."advertisement. "We have got a mayor who has been pushing and asking but we’re not getting supplies.”
He said the evacuation was almost entirely a Louisiana operation. “This is not a FEMA operation. I haven’t seen a single FEMA guy.”
“This is a desperate SOS,” New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said in a statement made available to CNN. “Right now we are out of resources at the convention center and don’t anticipate enough buses. Currently the convention center is unsanitary and unsafe and we are running out of supplies for 15,000 to 25,000 people”. “They don't have a clue what's going on down there,” the Mayor told WWL-AM Thursday night."
As of Friday, a chemical explosion is spreading poisinous fumes around the already destroyed city of New Orleans, threatening to kill thousands. Not since the Civil War have we seen such destruction, such suffereing on US soil. 911 pales in comparison. This is truly a National Disgrace of tragic porportions, and the situation needs to be adressed NOW, before thousands more, perhaps tens of thousnads die needlessly of starvation and third world diseases such as cholera and typhoid.
The American people need to call Senators, Representatives, Governors, the White House, the Media, Celebrities, Clergy etc. and demand that someone speak out, and take action. We have spent billions in Homeland Security preparedness, have tremendous resources, and yet are government is dispersing aid like molasses from an eye dropper, while people die. Many thousands more will die in the next few days if action is not taken.
Time to speak up America. Time to wake up Mr. President.
I don't know how to get these ideas out to the right people.
for immediate help to areas inaccessable, especially flooded residential areas, we could have crews with boats or choppers dropping of water and food near homes.
I would have a gas compressor in a chopper with tire innertubes water and MRE's, have the crew wrap the case of bottled water with the tire innertube's and inflate until snug, tie on a 10 foot rope with a sand bag, and drop and move on.
wrap MRE boxes in shrink wrap and repeat, possibly would have to shrink wrap MRE Box to innertube.
I think this would help people immediately.
they could shrink wrap supplies to cheap rubber rafts donated from department stores and drop.
the rafts could be untied from the sand bags and be used to get out.
Nancy
I am truly saddened by our governments poor response to this crisis. Before this tragedy happened I started a Section 527 Organization to help educate the voters and elect responible representatives.
THIS JUST IN.... I understand that Halliburton has received the No-Bid contract to clean up New Orleans .... If this is true a real revolution may occur.
United American Consumers is my organization. We are currently building a web site and we hope to reveal the slime under the Republican rocks.
Nothing quite like the Hurricane Katrina disaster has ever happened to America before. Do we know how to think about it? How do we conceptualize the reabsorption and successful reintegration of 1,000,000 people +/- into society after they have been evacuated from their hometown?
What do they need?
Shelter
Food
Clothing
Medicine
Money
Transportation
Jobs
Education
What else?
How much of this is to be provided by government? How much by communities? How much by business? Schools? Churches? NGOs?
Where do we start?
Right now we have 1,000,000 people triaged into communities outside the disaster area. Where do we begin to address the total dilemma their exodus creates?
Well, I think the place we must begin is for each and every one of us to see that America has changed overnight and will never be the same. A disaster has struck and life will not return to conditions as they were until the wound on the body politic that nature has inflicted on us is healed.
We cannot ignore the people that this has happened to and go back to our decades-long American party. We cannot maintain racial divisions, if they were there before, and think that what happened to a predominantly black community did not happen to our community (whatever it may be), in the event that we are not black. Some major changes will have to take place in how we look at things.
Providence has provided us with an opportunity to transform America. Transform what? Transform how? I visited a New Orleans Metroblog website where a photographer was displaying his photos and one of them was of a toilet filled with artificial "poo." Alright. Enough already of the poo culture. Stop it. Call it what you will -- grunge, misfits, Generation X. It leads nowhere, just as the society of the gliteratti will lead nowhere -- and the same for many other subcultures around us at the moment.
The "master race" subculture of rednecks and skinheads will also lead nowhere, if Adolf Hitler had not demonstrated so well a half a century ago, at a cost of 50 million dead. And all white supremacists are subscribers to that master-race view, no matter how dressed-up their version is.
My website (http://www.angelfire.com/space2/light11/index.html) actually points out that God has a plan for life and that our human lives have a purpose. It has nothing to do with poo culture, nothing to do with partying, nothing to do with master-races.
Apotheosizing filth and grunge, champagne and foie gras, or whites over blacks all miss the mark. We are as a society missing the mark.
Compassion, love, kindness, sharing -- these do not miss the mark. Don't you think it more than a coincidence that these are the very qualities called forth from us by a national disaster like Hurricane Katrina?
That's why I have said elsewhere that this is an event that could transform America. It could be the occasion on which we turn our backs on nihilism, materialism, exclusivism, and all other "isms." It could have a huge and positive impact on everyone concerned -- the ones who come forth to help and those who receive that help.
It could also fail to shake us from our complacency and we could go on partying for another decade until Providence provides us with another wake-up call.
I'd rather think that America wants to wake up now.
Life has a plan and a purpose. We are here for a reason. That reason is not simply to eat, drink, and be merry.
What is the plan? I discuss it at my website. It is known to all enlightened sages and saints, from all cultures and climes, all ages and walks of life.
Briefly, God created every sentient being so that, when that being comes to know its own true nature, God meets Him/Herself. I know that sounds a bit hard to follow. But at the moment of knowing one's own true nature, God meets God. In that moment, called by various religions Self-Knowledge, God-realization, spiritual union, salvation, yoga, nirvikalpa samadhi, whatever name you wish, God experiences Him/Herself.
The plan stipulates that consciousness goes out from God and into the realm of matter where it learns and learns and evolves and evolves until it realizes its true nature and returns again to oneness with God. Jacob's Ladder, Jesus' remark that he went forth from the Father, and came out into the world; again, he left the world and went to the Father (John 16:28), the tapestries of St. Hildegard of Bingen, visions of the Great Chain of Being -- all of these point to this great spiritual parabola that we follow away from God and back to Him/Her again, one lifetime after another.
Enlightenment, or the attainment of the knowledge of our own true nature, is the purpose of life. It is achieved by many paths and by the followers of all the world's religions. Jesus said that everything made by human hands shall be cast down. All our barriers to world community, all our prejudices, our bars and obsctacles towards universal acceptance and understanding must indeed be cast down -- the bars on our heart, the closed windows of the mind -- before we can realize our true nature.
So that is why we are here, lifetime after lifetime. Not to play around with poo culture or be glitterati or white supremacists. Or any other self-enclosed and self-fixated subcultural pattern.
We are here (1) to be human and (2) to be. We are here to find and enter the Kingdom of Being, the Kingdom of Heaven.
What has all this to do with Hurricane Katrina? We have now seen an exodus from New Orleans that will create in our midst a numberless group of our citizens whose difficulties will continue. Shall we cling to our poo culture, our glittering materialism, and our racial exclusivism and let the government handle the mess? Or shall we take hold of the levers of American society and march into this one and see the opportunity it presents to us to begin to live in a way that has us evolve and move towards that rendezvous with God that is the object of all our lives?
Every action of kindness and boldness we take now is a step on that journey. Every understanding hug we give, every way we extend ourselves is a gesture that knits our society together and heals the real wounds -- not the wounds of Hurricane Katrina, but the wounds of our own shallow values, hedonistic materialism, predatory capitalism (with its job-destruction programs and beggar-your-neighbour attitude), etc.
America as a nation has gone off the track. America is swaggering in international affairs, often bullying its way -- and for what? To sell a social way of being that creates a vast class of underprivileged and a small class of superwealthy? To sell a society that has automated work and put millions out of jobs and careers? To sell a religion which is the antithesis of the extended hand of Jesus, whose exclusivism is so narrow and unfriendly that it is embarrassing? What does America know of democracy? How in a democracy can one racial group be so disadvantaged? America's brand of "democracy" is the opiate of the masses, not religion (or, rather, spirituality). Democracy as it was meant to function does not function in America, where money buys votes and ruling parties rig elections.
Our response to Hurricane Katrina offers us the chance to get back on the track, but it will call for so much humility it embarrasses me to think of what we will have to cast aside. We have been so mistaken. We ARE so mistaken. Are we willing to pay the price that really meeting the disaster Hurricane Katrina has delivered to our doorstep requires? We who have criticized so many other regimes as soulless, are we prepared to let our soul respond as we have proudly boasted to other nations?
Fundamentalism is too narrow a response. Communism and similar ideologies are too narrow a response. Free enterprise is too narrow a response. What we call "democracy" is too narrow a response -- although true democracy would not be. We may not yet have framed a response that is broad enough to meet the need of the moment.
President Bush, stop merely playing the role of President. Get down there to New Orleans and set up a command post. Stop trying to look good. Stop thinking about the votes and the party. Stop representing a narrow constituency of the ultra-rich and thinking we all don't see. WE DO SEE.
We need a broad response from the heart, a strong and enduring response of the committed will. We need the best planners and thinkers, with strong representation from black leaders since most of the people concerned appear to be black, to come together and examine this problem we face. We need to draw up a battle plan that enlists all America in its service.
This opportunity can transform America. I can only repeat and repeat: Let us not miss this chance.
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