CM13 – Compilation 3
CONTENTS
1. The Fire Next Time
2. Conscience and Memory
3. Shelter and Safety
4. The Current Disaster (shortened version)
THE FIRE NEXT TIME
By Grace Lee Boggs
Michigan Citizen, Sept. 18-24, 2005
Hurricane Katrina gives us another opportunity to take a hard look at
ourselves and begin the re-ordering of priorities necessary to prevent
recurring natural, social and political disasters like 9/11, the Iraq war
and New Orleans.
The fury of Katrina, followed by the racist, classist, subhuman herding of
the black, poor and elderly into the Superdome and convention center, left
without food, air, water and toilets and to war against one another, while
government officials at all levels (including blacks) ran around like
Keystone cops, has created a crisis of biblical and constitutional
proportions.
We must seize this opportunity to ask ourselves and one another ³Why has
this happened? Where do we go from here?²
Forty years ago, Martin Luther King Jr., agonizing over the twin disasters
of the Vietnam War and the urban rebellions, called for a radical revolution
of values. Our technological development has outrun our spiritual
development, he warned. We have lost our sense of community, of
interconnection and participation. To regain these, we must struggle not
only against racism but against militarism and materialism. We must begin a
rapid shift from a ³thing-oriented society² to a ³person-oriented² one.
For example, we need to create programs that provide young people with
opportunities to engage in self-transforming and structure transforming
direct actions ³in our dying cities.²
At the same time we need to practice a more global concept of citizenship
based on an ³overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole.²
But King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, and since then, few people,
including blacks, have paid serious attention to his warnings. Instead
most Americans, including blacks and Democrats, have supported rather than
opposed rapid economic and technological development , even though it was
increasing global warming and widening the gulf between haves and
have-nots.
On the Gulf Coast this has meant expanding the oil, petrochemical and
shipping industries and eroding wetlands and marshes which were natural
barriers against flooding. It has also meant allowing New Orleans to become
a city with a 28% poverty rate, 88% African American, and the country¹s
highest murder rate, mostly in black and poor neighborhoods.
Meanwhile, multinational corporations in the Global North have been
Systematically impoverishing the peoples and the environment of the Global South and
destroying their communities and cultures.
The result was 9/11.
However, instead of recognizing 9/11 as a wakeup call, challenging
us to begin living more simply so that others can simply live, we allowed
Bush & Co. to paralyze us with fear and lead us into the quagmire in Iraq.
Today, there are a million evacuees needing compassionate assistance in the
form of food, housing, schooling, medical care. In New Orleans elementary
services like electricity, water, sewage need to be restored. But while
meeting these emergency needs we cannot afford to keep ignoring the
fundamental questions raised by Vietnam and the urban rebellions in the
1960s and by 9/11 only four years ago.
For example, should New Orleans be rebuilt? If so, on what values? What
is going to keep us from re-creating the culture of violence and dog eat
dog that turned the Superdome into hell? Why can¹t we start involving our
young people from K-12 in self-transforming and structure-transforming
community-building programs along the lines proposed by MLK, thereby
creating a culture of cooperation that will bring the neighbor back into
the Ohood and also provide greater safety in times of natural disasters?
Who is going to ask and who is going to decide these questions?
These are the times to grow our souls. Otherwise the fire next time.
CONSCIENCE AND MEMORY
By Shea Howell
Michigan Citizen, Sept, 18-24, 2005
The conscience of our nation, roiled by the floodwaters of the delta, is
beginning to calm. Old and predictable ways of thinking are resurfacing to
explain away the troubling images of a nation divided by race, class and
age.
Republicans, initially shaken by the harsh results of years of slashing
government spending, ignoring environmental warnings and helping the rich
at the expense of the poor, are returning to their old ideology. Some are
now saying that the rebuilding of New Orleans is an opportunity to put into
practice long-held beliefs about school vouchers and faith-based
initiatives. Some see an opportunity to create enterprise zones, free of
environmental restrictions, labor regulations and health laws. Some have
suggested that the real problem behind the sluggish response to the crisis
was too much government, not too little. And a few are saying that this was
God¹s punishment to a decadent city of gay people and other sinners.
Democrats, too, seem reluctant to pursue the serious questions we are now
facing. They would like yet another set of hearings. They want to be sure
that everyone is included in the decisions about rebuilding the city.
Our public culture does not invite introspection. We are encouraged to move
quickly from crisis to action. But the questions raised by this moment
should not be so easily dismissed.
New Orleans was dying long before Hurricane Katrina. The majority of its
people were poor. Most were women, children and elders. More than a quarter
of them did not even own cars, let alone have the means to transport them
hundreds of miles to safety. Public transportation was crumbling. Schools
were failing; dropout rates were astronomical. Corruption in government was
a source of daily scandal. The murder rate was soaring and the police
seemed powerless to provide public safety.
Life in New Orleans, outside the party image, was much like life for
millions of Americans in far too many of our cities. Detroit, Cleveland,
Buffalo, Gary, Pittsburgh, Oakland and St. Louis are all dying slowly but
surely, as they mirror the failures of New Orleans to create a vibrant,
healthy and productive civic life for most of their people.
We should not be asking why so many Americans were shocked by images of
racial, class and age divisions, but why does it take a mass tragedy for us
to notice? How can it be that people are willing to open their homes,
schools, hotels and churches to provide sanctuary for people they have never
even seen, yet are able to walk by those among us who are forced to beg for
food and water just to get through another day? What has happened to our
hearts that we are moved by mass tragedy, yet able to ignore the small,
daily indignities and inequities on our own streets?
There is a delicate relationship between conscience and memory. Memory,
brought to life in conversations that allow for complexity over quick
answers, can be a source of creative renewal. Today, as the pressure mounts
to forget the tragedy of the failed promise of America revealed in New
Orleans, we have a responsibility to engage in the kinds of discussions with
one another that keep the memories of these last few weeks alive. When we
find ourselves saying the things we thought before Katrina, we need to stop,
to challenge ourselves and one another to ask ³What did we really see and
feel? What does all of this mean, not just for New Orleans, but also for the
kind of people we are and the kind of country we have yet to become?²
Shelter and Safety
by Jordan Flaherty
Last New Year's Eve, a Black Georgia Southern University student named Levon Jones
was killed by bouncers in the Bourbon Street club Razzoo's. The outrage led to near-daily
protests outside the club, threats of a Black tourist boycott of New Orleans, and a city
commission to explore the issue of racism in the French Quarter. Despite widelypublicized advance warning, a "secret shopper" audit of the Quarter found rampant
discrimination in French Quarter businesses, including different dress codes, admission
prices, and drink prices, all based on whether the patron was black or white.
"The French Quarter is not a place for Black people," one community organizer told me
pre-hurricane. "You don't see Black folks working in the front of house in French Quarter
restaurants or hotels, and you don't see them as customers."
Just north of the French Quarter, a few blocks from Razzoo's, is the historic Treme
neighborhood. Settled in the early 1800s, it's known as the oldest free African-American
community in the US. Residents fear for the post-reconstruction stability of communities
like Treme. "There's nothing some developers would like more than a ring of white
neighborhoods around the French Quarter," said one Treme resident recently. The
widespread fear among organizers is that the exclusionary, "tourists only" atmosphere of
the French Quarter will be multiplied and expanded across the city, and that many
residents simply wont be able to return home.
Chui Clark is a longtime community organizer from New Orleans, and was one of the
leaders of the protests against Razzoo's. He now stays in Baton Rouge's River Street
shelter. "This is a lily-white operation," he reports.
"You have white FEMA and Red Cross workers watching us like we're some kind of
amusement." Despite repeated assurances of housing placements from Red Cross and
government officials, the population of the Baton Rouge shelters does not appear to be
decreasing, according to Clark. "You have new arrivals all the time. Folks who were
staying with families for a week or two are getting kicked out and they got no where else
to go."
I went to the River Road shelter as part of a project initiated by Families and Friends of
Louisiana's Incarcerated Children to help displaced New Orleans residents reconnect with
loved ones who are lost in the labyrinth of Louisiana's corrections system.
Everyone I met was desperately trying to find a sister or brother or child or other family
member lost in the system. Many people who were picked up for minor infractions in the
days before the hurricane ended up being shipped to the infamous Angola Prison, a
former slave plantation where it's estimated over 90% of the inmates currently
incarcerated will die within its walls. Most of the family members I spoke with just
wanted to get a message to their loved ones, "Tell him that we've been looking for him,
that we made it out of New Orleans, and that we love him," said a former East New
Orleans resident named Angela.
While Barbara Bush speaks of how fortunate the shelter residents are, in the real world
New Orleans evacuees have been feeling anything but sheltered.
One woman I spoke with in the River Street shelter said that she's barely slept since she
arrived in the shelter system. "I sleep with one eye open," she told me. "Its not safe in
there."
According to Christina Kucera, a feminist organizer from New Orleans, "issues of safety
and shelter are intricately tied to gender. This has hit women particularly hard. Its the
collapse of community. We've lost neighbors and systems within our communities that
helped keep us safe."
Where once everyone in a neighborhood knew each other, now residents from each block
are spread across several states. Communities and relationships that came together over
decades were dispersed in hours.
Kucera lists the problems she's heard, "there have been reports of rapes and assaults
before evacuation and in the shelters. And that's just the beginning.
There are continuing safety and healthcare needs. There are women who were planning
on having children who now no longer have the stability to raise a child and want an
abortion, but they have no money, and nowhere to go to get one. Six of the thirteen rape
crisis centers in Louisiana were closed by the hurricane."
One longtime community organizer from the New Orleans chapter of INCITE! Women
of Color Against Violence has written, "We have to have some form of community
accountability for the sexual and physical violence women and children endured. I'm not
interested in developing an action plan to rebuild or organize a people's agenda in New
Orleans without a gender analysis and a demand for community accountability."
We are already unsettled, and now Hurricane Rita threatens a new wave of evacuations.
Astrodome residents are being out on buses and planes.
While communities continue to be dispersed, some New Orleanians are staying and
building. Diane "Momma D" Frenchcoat never evacuated out of her Treme home on
North Dorgenois Street, and has been helping feed and support 50 families, coordinating
a relief and rebuilding effort consisting of, at its peak, 30 volunteers known as the Soul
Patrol.
"I ain't going nowhere," one Soul Patrol member told the New Orleans Times-Picayune
newspaper in a september 18 article about Momma D. "I'm the son of a bricklayer. I'm
ready to cut some sheetrock, lay some block, anything to rebuild the city."
Asked about her plan, Momma D had these words, "Rescue. Return. Restore. Can you
hear what I'm saying, baby? Listen to those words again. Rescue, return, restore. We
want the young, able-bodied men who are still here to stay to help those in need. And the
ones that have been evacuated, we want them to come home and help clean up and
rebuild this city. How can the city demand that we evacuate our homes but then have
thousands of people from across this country volunteering to do the things that we can do
ourselves?"
Community organizers like Momma D in Treme and Malik Rahim, who has a similar
network in the Algiers neighborhood, are the forces for relief and rebuilding that need our
help. The biggest disaster was not a hurricane, but the dispersal of communities, and
that's the disaster that needs to be addressed first.
Yesterday a friend told me through tears, "I just want to go back as if this never
happened. I want to go back to my friends and my neighbors and my community." Its our
community that has brought us security. People I know in New Orleans don't feel safer
when they see Blackwater mercenaries on their block, but they do feel security from
knowing their neighbors are watching out for them. And that's why the police and
national guard and security companies on our streets haven't brought us the security
we've been looking for, and why discussions of razing neighborhoods makes us feel cold.
When we say we want our city back, we don't mean the structures and the institutions,
and we don't mean "law and order," we mean our community, the people we love. And
that's the city we want to fight for.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jordan Flaherty is a union organizer and editor of Left Turn Magazine. He can be reached
at neworleans (at) leftturn.org. He is not planning on moving out of New Orleans.
THE CURRENT DISASTER
by Joshua Breitbart
What we see in Katrina is a failure of our government. We've seen this before in
our daily lives or in past disasters, blackouts, scandals, and acts of war. But Katrina has
provided a set of examples of this failure that are astoundingly clear, well-publicized and
deadly.
Time and again in Katrina's wake, we saw people in positions of official authority
thwart the initiatives of everyday people that would have saved lives and alleviated
suffering. "Bureaucracy has committed murder here," is how the president of Jefferson
Parish, Aaron Broussard explained it, accusing the Federal Emergency Management
Agency of blocking deliveries of water and diesel fuel into the parish.
It is difficult to say why the authorities acted this way. Reflecting on the clearlyincompetent Michael Brown, it almost seems like his idea of competence was
centralizing all decisions in him. Instead of pushing resources down to the affected area,
he wanted to remain in control of every boat, fireman, and bottle of water under FEMA's
auspices. This meant that people who knew what were happening – to some extent the
mayor but also the people still inside the city – could not get what they needed to respond
without explaining the situation to Brown. Even in the best conditions, that would greatly
slow the response. With phones and power lines down, it was impossible.
Beyond structural inefficiencies, the government intentionally withheld aid from
the people of New Orleans and other affected areas. There are clear cases of this at a
micro-level, where food deliveries or the serving of lunch were delayed so George or
Laura Bush could fly in for a photo op. But the number of times that FEMA officials
actively prevented aid from arriving – accepting only one truck of a large offer from
Chicago, tying up in red tape New Mexico's offer of National Guard troops, turning away
500 local boatsmen ready to search for survivors – would make anyone wonder if they
were trying to help.
The only resource the state and city could offer the poor residents of New Orleans was a
DVD telling them to leave in the event of a hurricane. "The primary message [of the DVD] is
that each person is primarily responsible for themselves, for their own family and friends,"
community activist Rev. Marshall Truehill said. The title of the DVD was "Preparing for the Big
One." It was still on the shelves waiting to be distributed when Katrina struck.
"You're responsible for your safety, and you should be responsible for the person next to
you," local Red Cross executive director Kay Wilkins told The New Orleans Times-Picayune in a
pre-Katrina report on the DVD.
As musicologist Ned Sublette observed, "It's as if you had advance notice that
mohammed atta's crew was coming to the world trade center and evacuated all but the poor from
it." He worried what might happen if the Superdome did not hold up under the storm. "Chronicle
of a genocide foretold," he wrote.
One could imagine the government's handling of Katrina as a twenty-first century
Tuskegee experiment in disaster response: a chance to study an American city under the
kind of stress that war and nature have in store for us. Local residents claim to have heard
explosions when the levees ruptured, hearkening back to the intentional flooding of poor,
rural areas to save the city of New Orleans during a 1927 flood. But questions about the
levees being intentionally dynamited to flood poor neighborhoods and save the French
Quarter go past the point.
We don't need an investigation to tell us what we saw. We don't have to split
hairs. The government has been withholding aid from poor people in the Gulf Coast
region since Reconstruction. People were starving, living in inadequate shelter, and not
receiving health care before the storm struck. Why would we think they would receive
anything afterwards?
We have to be clear that there are not good authorities and bad authorities among
those that were supposed to do something about this disaster. They are all part of a single
system that caused the death or suffering of thousands of people.
The media is already working to portray the battle over blame for Katrina as a
choice between Democrats and Republicans. Within a week, The Washington Post was
writing articles with headlines like "GOP Agenda Shifts as Political Trials Grow: Katrina
Puts Estate Tax Repeal on Ice." Only a sadist could stay focused on repealing the estate
tax in a time like this. (That's the best way to describe Grover Norquist, head of
Americans for Tax Reform, who has said he wants to drown government in a bath tub
and who issued an immediate statement after Katrina that the repeal of the estate tax was
just what Gulf Coast residents needed to rebuild.) Then The New York Times followed
with "Democrats Step Up Criticism of White House" and "Katrina Divides Rather Than
Unifies U.S." They're right about the divide, but wrong that it's between Republicans and
Democracts.
If we allow the response to Katrina to become a partisan battle playing out in
Washington DC, we will ensure another catastrophe just like it in the near future and the
continued suffering of our nation's poor in the meantime. If we learned anything from the
9/11 Commission, it was that a bi-partisan commission of Washington insiders will find
no one to blame. An investigation led by George Bush himself cannot be taken seriously.
If we're going to have a federal government, disaster mitigation and response is
definitely one of the responsibilities they should have. A more capable FEMA, like the
one headed by James Witt under Clinton, would likely have responded sooner and more
effectively. Clinton had cut funding to New Orleans's levees, but not to the extent that
Bush did. Bush cancelled Project Impact, the mitigation program created by the Clinton
administration.
But no matter what FEMA does, whether it focuses on natural disasters or
terrorism, whether it leaves 20,000 to die or 1,000, civilian response will always be the
most immediate and significant component of disaster relief. The home page for the 2004
World Disasters Report from The International Federation of Red Cross and Red
Crescent Societies tells it plainly: "In the hours after sudden disaster strikes, most lives
are saved by the courage and resourcefulness of friends and neighbours." That's why
every disaster will reveal the extent of impoverishment and incapacitation at the local
level. Watching a disaster offers a window onto the stark imbalances in different
communities' health and wealth caused by capitalism and white supremacism.
George Bush may be the worst of the characters in the story of Hurricane Katrina.
But put any of the other public officials – Chertoff, Brown, Bianco, or Nagin – in his
place and local police departments would still care more about property than people,
devastating climate change would proceed, and millions of people in the United States
and billions around the world would remain in poverty with their situations getting worse.
Fire who you want, fire them all, but we need to address these fundamental problems.
We are ready to argue that our choice is between centralized government and selfgovernment. Having witnessed the clear and utter failure of their government at all levels,
millions of people are now ready to hear this. Rather than taking the side of this or that
politician, we should adopt the slogan of the popular uprising in Argentina: They all must
go.
Of course, this is not to be confused with reducing government in favor of a
"reliance on the private sector." In the short term, the most we could expect is that these
politicians are merely replaced with others that are more responsive to their constituents
and more willing to put resources and decisionmaking power into the hands of local
communities, even if it means taking them away from large corporations. But we also
need to fully realize what actions we can take without waiting for the approval of any
outside authority.
Whether we like it or not, we are in line for more Katrina-like cataclysms. If New
Orleans is the city in North America most vulnerable to climate change, which city is
number two? While I support the community activists who are calling to rebuild New
Orleans, even the most business-oriented development plans strike me as utopian in the
face of our new reality. Miles of homes are coated in oil and petrochemicals. The region
was already known as Cancer Alley. And the way the toxic floodwaters are being
pumped into Lake Pontchartrain is making matters worse. "It will take 10 years to get
everything up and running and safe," EPA expert Hugh Kaufman told The Independent.
Our country has the resources to clean up the mess and rebuild the city in any
fashion we choose. And regardless of all other factors, we need to proceed with a
cleanup; thousands of people are still in the area and plan to live their lives there. We
could easily pay for it with the money we are currently using to fight the war in Iraq. Or,
as the conservative Heritage Foundation suggests, Congress could redirect the pork barrel
funding from their recently-enacted highway bill. Those are just the easy ones.
Billions of dollars are already starting to flow into the region with little oversight.
Community involvement in the allocation of those funds is critical, even when they're not
directed towards residential areas. It's the only check on the massive graft and patronage
that characterize government spending, especially in Louisiana and Mississippi, two of
the most corrupt states in the nation. War profiteers like Halliburton, Bechtel, and Fluor
have already secured rebuilding contracts. Without a doubt, displaced residents need to
organize to respond with coordinated power to their current situation.
However, if we take a long, hard look at our situation we see that we will have a
hard enough time just holding the line of devastation where it is without trying to push it
back to where it was before Katrina. At its heart, rebuilding New Orleans is a
conservative response, even if it's also an emotional one. These are radical times. The
deep challenges of global climate change, peak oil, massive poverty, fragile health, and
continuing racism require our focused attention. While any rebuilding of the Gulf Coast
must be community-directed and ecologically-sound, our primary focus must be on
mitigating future natural and human-made disasters.
To be ready for the coming disasters, we need massive resources deployed at the
most local level throughout the country and, of course, the world. If the government will
provide them, great. If not, we need to work to secure them ourselves.
To start, we must put an immediate end to hunger and homelessness in the United
States. After Katrina, we can no longer pretend that poverty does not exist within our
borders. We have no excuse. Poverty in the United States is like the levees in New
Orleans. The warning signs are there and people will die if we do not heed them.
After surveying 27 cities, the U.S. Conference of Mayors recently announced that
hunger and homelessness are on the rise in major cities. Nearly half of the cities surveyed
reported that emergency food assistance facilities may have to turn away people in need
due to lack of resources. "These are not simply statistics," Nashville Mayor Bill Purcell,
who co-chairs the Conference's Task Force on Hunger and Homelessness, said. "These
are real people, many are families with children, who are hungry and homeless in our
cities."
Our country has enough resources to feed, clothe, and house every person in it.
Once every person displaced by Katrina has been provided this security, the airdrops of
water and MREs should begin in Detroit, Anacostia, Appalachia, and every Native
American reservation. I am not naive enough to believe this will happen under our
current government. But every day that it doesn't is another Katrina in slow motion.
We must confront the healthcare crisis in the United States, which
disproportionately impacts African Americans. More than 50 evacuees have already died
in Texas. Officials suggested that many of them, like Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown who
died in Orange, Texas, after being evacuated from New Orleans, had pre-existing health
conditions. In the United States, being Black is a pre-existing health condition. “When it
comes to your risk of stroke, you get a penalty for being African American, you get a
penalty for living in the South, and you get an ‘extra’ penalty for being an African
American living in the South,” Dr. George Howard said after analyzing stroke death data
from 1997 through 2001.
The American Heart Association will tell you that African Americans are at
increased risk for hypertension and heart disease. The countless stories of stranded New
Orleans residents needing insulin exposed what the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention's statistics had already proven: that Blacks are 30 percent more likely to have
diabetes than whites. While the rates of diagnosis for diabetes is declining for both
groups, it is declining twice as fast for whites as for Blacks. In short, the poor overall
health of New Orleans' African Americans put them at greater risk during the hurricane,
flood, and evacuation, just as it puts them at greater risk in everyday life.
Even beyond this systemic level, it is clear that racism directly caused some of the
death and suffering in Katrina's wake – again, just as it causes death and suffering
everyday. Whether in the Gretna Sheriffs' refusal to allow evacuations on foot or in the
media's portrayal of "looters" that helped justify the decision to order police and National
Guard to "shoot to kill," American white supremacy brought violence and repression to
African Americans in their most desperate moments before it brought them food and
water. This, too, happens everyday. Racism is so ingrained in the fabric of America that it
is hard to imagine that we could overcome it as a country. Increased community control
over resources, decisions, and media would help considerably.
Since catastrophes strike the disenfranchised the hardest, disaster preparedness is
a form of redistribution of wealth. The only way to mitigate the effects of a catastrophe is
to make sure that everyone has food, clothing, shelter, good health and strong
communication networks before it hits. The public awareness following Katrina provides
an opportunity for us to make demands of our government officials and to take our own
actions to prepare our communities.
Urban centers must immediately publish their full evacuation plans. If they can't
do so, they should admit to being unprepared and then they should start getting prepared.
The New Orleans plan of "you're on your own" is not acceptable. Security at this level is
a primary function of government. Anyone who's in the government should fulfill this
part of their job or quit. Every city and region in the country must publish immediately its
plan for evacuating every resident in case of a catastrophic emergency.
"A plan should not be some requirement," Florida's emergency management
chief, Craig Fugate, told the Palm Beach Post in an article about Louisiana and
Mississippi's failed or non-existent hurricane response plans. "It should truly reflect what
your real needs are, and what your real resources are."
After seeing the government's response to Katrina, few people trust that it will
keep them safe. They want proof, not some bullshit excuse that you won't share the
information with the public because then the terrorists will have it. People will no longer
accept that. Government incompetence is a bigger danger than any terrorist.
Start investing seriously in public transportation, including light-rail systems that
would be capable of handling mass evacuations. At other times, these light rails can
replace fuel-inefficient long-haul trucking.
Sign the fucking Kyoto treaty already. And then start figuring out how to cut
emissions even further. The state-level pact recently completed in the northeast is a fine
strategy, but the world needs to drastically reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the
air.
Get together with other countries to reduce disasters. The UN World Conference
on Disaster Reduction is a good place to start. So is Cuba, where they were able to
evacuate 1.5 million people ahead of last year's Hurricane Ivan – a category 5 – with
nearly zero lives lost and no looting or curfews. Marjorie Cohn, in an article for Truthout,
explains Cuba's success with a quote from Dr. Nelson Valdes, a sociology professor at
the University of New Mexico and a specialist in Latin America: "The whole civil
defense is embedded in the community to begin with. People know ahead of time where
they are to go... Shelters all have medical personnel, from the neighborhood. They have
family doctors in Cuba, who evacuate together with the neighborhood, and already know,
for example, who needs insulin."
Emergency stores of food and water should not be held in FEMA bunkers or
National Guard armories. They should be available in every area of 10,000 people as an
emergency food and water depot whose location is well-publicized.
The last two weeks have shown that we need more than food and water to survive.
We need basic survival skills like first aid, emergency medicine, and fire safety. We have
also seen that we need to be able to organize ourselves in times of crisis. In short, we
need to be able to survive without government.
This includes setting up communication networks. A major problem in the Gulf
Coast was the lack of access to correct information. As with water, food, clothes and
shelter, communication is a human right. We need methods for speaking with each other
and the ability to adapt those methods to even the worst of circumstances.
This does not mean a Magnetic Acoustic Device, like the prototype that was sent
to the Gulf Coast allegedly to provide a "communications infrastructure to get
information or instructions out to people," according to Wired News. A MAD can direct
sound signals from over a mile away; it can also be used as an "area denial option," using
painful sonic blasts to attack and clear crowds.
Rather, we need participatory communications networks, especially in the hands
of people that are shut out of traditional broadcast outlets. This might include low-power
radio and shortwave radio, text messaging and other phone-based tools. It can also mean
websites or newspapers, especially when connected to community organizing efforts,
since otherwise those can exclude people who don't read or get online. Sometimes a
gathering point or a bulletin board can suffice. Whatever the method, they're available to
us right now and we should be implementing them more and more.
So let's make our own DVD, one with real information on how to help your
family and neighbors. The possible content of such a DVD is vast, including suturing,
morse code, generator maintenance, and water purification. It would be great if it worked
in print and audio as well as video, and was in multiple languages. Let's teach each other
what to do in a natural disaster. Hell, let's teach each other what to do in the current
disaster.