Sunday, August 28, 2005
A few Sunday night linksI've been glued to CNN the past couple of hours as the worst nightmare
seems to be coming true for the city of New Orleans. There's still a
slim chance the storm will move to the east and spare the city of the
massive storm surges that could leave the city submerged for months. It
is overwhelmingly worrisome. New Orleans is a poor city. There are more
than 100,000 residents who do not have cars let alone enough money to
evacuate. More than 25,000 are in the Superdome right now, up in the
stands as the floor of the stadium is expected to be flooded when the
storm hits in about eight hours. The city is surrounded by
petrochemical plants, and that toxicity combined with the sewer and
debris of the city itself could create a deadly cocktail for the
residents stuck there. This in addition to the lack of food and water,
electricity, and ways of escape, may lead to catastrophe. 10:53:03 PM | I have called many of my friends and none were home, which gives me hope that they were able to get out. Who knows what tomorrow will bring. I'm hoping I will wake to the good news that this horrible storm hit the much less populated Mississippi gulf coast, a tragedy still, but not of epic proportions. As my friend Rebecca said on the phone tonight, "Now it's a numbers game." And she knows the game of numbers, having worked with cholera epidemics, outbreaks of sleeping sickness, famine, and the chaos of war. We lived together the past couple of years, Rebecca, S, Casey, and I. She knew as much about being prepared for disaster (nature- and human-made) than any FEMA officer, so we had large plastic buckets to fill with water, stores of batteries and working radios, not to mention a map with evacuation routes. The vast majority of New Orleanians are not so lucky. They have no resources of their own and the city is notoriously understaffed and underresourced. I'm thinking about all of them tonight. I meant to post a few of these links earlier today. Here they are: Ben at Doce Meses de Soledad II: I was watching
the news at breakfast, and they were covering the dueling activists in
Crawford, Texas. One of their talking heads was contrasting Vietnam to
Iraq. He made the comment that the war is still generally seen as being
worthwhile, but if this should change, there might be more weight
behind the anti-war protesters. He said, approximately, "If soldiers
start coming home from Baghdad and saying, 'being over there is a
complete waste. It's pointless', then maybe people will start
reconsidering the war." The Professor on the fabricated "conflict" between evolutionary science and "intelligent design," and how this relates to the teaching of controversy in English classrooms during the 1990s and the tragic Terri Schiavo case. This cartoon from the Blue Voice. An article from The Nation about military-public school partnerships, like the one formed with a high school near us, the soon-to-be Senn Naval Academy (right now it's Senn High School). I was shocked to read Chicago has more of these partnerships than any other city and our embattled mayor intends to have more. Most of the students at Senn are the children of immigrants with few economic opportunities for post-high school education. This partnership wouldn't be bad if there were other opportunities for these kids, but there aren't. It's not like the city is partnering with the Art Institute of Chicago to have a neighborhood high school of the arts, or with Boeing to have a neighborhood high school of science and engineering. There are a handful of magnet high schools in the city, open to students who score at a certain level on entrance exams. But Senn's not one of them. It's a neighborhood school. Soon enough it will be a neighborhood naval academy. And of course, the latest from the jewel of the South, beautiful and heartbreaking New Orleans. 
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New Orleanians Flee KatrinaHurricane Katrina is headed for New Orleans.
Mayor Nagin has said "this is not a test," because the possibility for
true catastrophe is upon the city with this one, a category 5 storm
with 12-foot storm surge already on the Lousiana coast. I talked to my
friends Margarita and Neza yesterday and they were headed out
within minutes for Houston to beat the traffic jams that inevitably
come with evacuation orders. 10:27:44 AM | I'm thinking about all you, my friends in New Orleans. Stay safe, ya'll! Please!
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Last update: 9/1/05; 10:09:19 AM .
