[lit-ideas] Re: Katrina
- From: "Andreas Ramos" <andreas@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 4 Sep 2005 10:25:12 -0700
From: "Andy Amago" <aamago@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Let's assume you, despite your best efforts you wound up there
(just play pretend for a minute, okay?). What would you do? Seriously,
what would you personally do?
I wondered what I would have done.
It seems odd that, when it became obvious that "The Authorities" weren't coming (by late
Monday or early Tuesday), there wasn't self-organization. Surely, in the 20-30,000 people in
the Superdome, there were ministers, police, Scount troop leaders, doctors, ex-military, and
so on.
Why didn't they form their own structure, take stock of resources, assign people to take
care of the ill and dying, assign teams to patrol, assign groups to clean the space? Why
didn't anyone collect the bodies and move them to a room where they could lie in dignity,
instead of scattered around like dead dogs?
To me, this is a perplexing question. Why didn't they take responsiblity for themselves,
instead of just sitting in their misery? Andy asks "what would you have done?" and that's
what I would have done: organize. Yes, even without food, water, or medicine. At least stand
in dignity as humans.
Their on-the-spot self-organized representatives and leaders could have spoken with
journalists and gotten the word out, instead of those horrible images of squalor and misery.
The collapse of New Orleans will provide research decades of material for
sociologists.
yrs,
andreas
www.andreas.com
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
Other related posts:
