as a proud former Marshall Fields elf (yes, sedaris and I could swap some good stories), I can't let Macy's kill off my favorite, 140yr Chicago landmark, department store!
help save Marshall Fields!
Save Marshall Fields!
28 September 2005
DON'T LET MACY'S KILL MARSHALL FIELDS!!!
as a proud former Marshall Fields elf (yes, sedaris and I could swap some good stories), I can't let Macy's kill off my favorite, 140yr Chicago landmark, department store!
help save Marshall Fields!
Save Marshall Fields!
08 September 2005
that garbage in our backyard
People are so shocked, appalled, surprised by the looting, raping, killing that went on in and around the Superdome.
Do people in this country not realize this is a daily reality for the people we hide in our projects?
We sit in our Pottery Barn leather chair, sipping Starbucks with that college degree certificate on the wall -- that education at least partly paid for by our parents. We shake our heads, look down our noses at them saying "well they deserve to live in poverty if they're too lazy to WORK for a living. We EARNED what we have here."
I dunno about you, but I didn't EARN the priviledge of being born a white woman to a man with masters degrees in Engineering & Physics from a top university. I didn't EARN the priviledge of growing up in a cute pretty home in an upper middle-class neighborhood host to good elementary and high schools with state champion programs. These were all things that were handed to me by devine luck. And all these things held my hand through my development and are 90% responsible, in my opinion, for any success I've enjoyed in life.
From what I heard growing up, projects like Cabrini Green and the Robert Taylor homes (Chicago) were nearly like prison/war zones 24/7. I remember taking the Halsted bus to ballet class every morning from my hipster Lakeview 3 flat past Cabrini Green. As the bus cruised between North and Division, all of us would hunker down so we wouldn't be exposed in the windows should any gunfire fly from the projects.
Now imagine being 7 years old, about 50 pounds, about 3 feet tall. And to go to school, you have to walk past drug dealers and gangs firing the same guns we feared on that Halsted bus. Would you go to school every day if doing so meant you may lose your life? What if you're a young boy being raised by a single mom and you know, by leaving her home alone, she's vulnerable to that rapist down the hall and the locks on the door haven't been sturdy for years.
I remember skipping school for a week becuase I no longer could withstand the teasing from my classmates. If they were 100 pounds heavier with guns and knives....well....
So we here in the US have shoved what we don't want to see in the dark alleys, dirty and dangerous buildings grouped together out of the way so we don't have to be reminded of them and our failure as a society to help them.
Kinda like the crap you put behind your garage because you don't want to look at it, yet for some reason you know you can't destroy it?
Putting it behind the garage doesn't improve the conditions of the undesirables.
It doesn't make it go away.
It just sits there getting more decrepit.
Am I the only one who sees all Katrina did was destroy the garage so we're forced to see what we've been hiding behind it for decades?
07 September 2005
robert taylor projects, new orleans, failure
Good story passed on to me by the most awesome Jermaine- I replied to him to say so, then found myself rambling, then, in my own self-absorbed-self-importance, felt the need to share share everywhere-
I'd forgotten the sadness I learned in Chicago's Robert Taylor projects until now. This is long becuase there's my story, then the Intellectual Activist's story- but, well I think both are important to share- but IA's is more, er, intellectual, so if you're here, but short on time, scroll down to his story.
**************************************************
I taught dancing to kids in the Robert Taylor projects. Clinton's response to Chicago being named worst education system was pouring millions of dollars into alternative ways to teach math/science to the poorest kids.
Every day we arrived, for 8 weeks, we were greeted in the elementary school by 2 large, stern, Chicago police officers standing guard at the front door, equipped with billy clubs and guns, bullet-proof vests. They'd check our bags, the battery compartments of our stereos, pad us down confirming no weapons.
Daily life for a grade-school student on the south side of Chicago- whee!
The kids had to earn the priviledge of staying after school 2 days/week to learn math/science via song and dance skills.
They were THRILLED with what they developed. I personally taught choreography and biology to 8 3rd-grade girls. Then witnessed them choreograph a 3-minute dance that also represented the water cycle!
The boys created a 3-minute rap on the solar system.
It was brilliant.
They were so proud.
They wanted to put on a show for their school and parents and anyone who would watch.
The teacher said "oh no, that won't happen"
and we said "oh yeah....we're such out of touch artists, we forget normal people are busy at jobs until 5 or 6pm ooops"
she shook her head sadly and said "you think the parents of these kids have JOBS?! nooooooo *angry chuckle* they're not tied up with jobs. they just don't give a damn. nobody cares about these poor kids. they won't come"
I think those 8 weeks were simultaneously the most inspiring and most discouraging of my adult life.
These kids were smarter and harder working than most of the suburban white kids I met while teaching dance...
...and I knew they'd end up, at best, making minimum wages and living in poverty.
Good points made
but Bush's still the devil- hee
----------------- Bulletin Message -----------------
From: jermaine
Date: Sep 7, 2005 6:12 PM
Just PARTIALLY. I mean, he was still on vacation THREE DAYS after the storm hit!!! But anyhoo....
This article is from the editor of The Intellectual Activist (www.TIADaily.com).
He offers the most intellectual point of view so far, which makes sense since he's editor of The Intellectual Activist...
Thoughts?
_________________________________________________
An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State
by Robert Tracinski
Sep 02, 2005
It took four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them, because it also took me four long days to figure out what was going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster.
If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure. For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.
Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists—myself included—did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting.
But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.
The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong.
The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over four days last week. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.
The man-made disaster is the welfare state.
For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in an emergency—indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved in other emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been saying that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even what we expect from a Third World country.
When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize to keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in America. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen this a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and serve as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection) and large ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).
So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?
To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a description from a Washington Times story:
"Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists, knives and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and police and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on.
"The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire....
"Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened Arkansas National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders.
" 'These troops are...under my orders to restore order in the streets,' she said. 'They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will.' "
The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article shows a SWAT team with rifles and armored vests riding on an armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid, listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It looks exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.
What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to speed away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Superdome?
Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?
My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage one night on Fox News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, which is located in the South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one of the largest high-rise public housing projects in America. "The projects," as they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediable squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.)
What Sherri was getting from last night's television coverage was a whiff of the sense of life of "the projects." Then the "crawl"—the informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels—gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75f the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of those who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then told me that early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails—so they just let many of them loose. [Update: I have been searching for news reports on this last story, but I have not been able to confirm it. Instead, I have found numerous reports about the collapse of the corrupt and incompetent New Orleans Police Department; see here and here.]
There is no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations--that is, a large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects, and vice versa.
There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit—but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals—and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep—on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.
All of this is related, incidentally, to the incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. In a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters—not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.
No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example, for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the chaos on American "individualism." But the truth is precisely the opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of individualism.
What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. And they don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.
But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.
People living in piles of their own trash, while petulantly complaining that other people aren't doing enough to take care of them and then shooting at those who come to rescue them—this is not just a description of the chaos at the Superdome. It is a perfect summary of the 40-year history of the welfare state and its public housing projects.
The welfare state—and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages—is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.
I'd forgotten the sadness I learned in Chicago's Robert Taylor projects until now. This is long becuase there's my story, then the Intellectual Activist's story- but, well I think both are important to share- but IA's is more, er, intellectual, so if you're here, but short on time, scroll down to his story.
**************************************************
I taught dancing to kids in the Robert Taylor projects. Clinton's response to Chicago being named worst education system was pouring millions of dollars into alternative ways to teach math/science to the poorest kids.
Every day we arrived, for 8 weeks, we were greeted in the elementary school by 2 large, stern, Chicago police officers standing guard at the front door, equipped with billy clubs and guns, bullet-proof vests. They'd check our bags, the battery compartments of our stereos, pad us down confirming no weapons.
Daily life for a grade-school student on the south side of Chicago- whee!
The kids had to earn the priviledge of staying after school 2 days/week to learn math/science via song and dance skills.
They were THRILLED with what they developed. I personally taught choreography and biology to 8 3rd-grade girls. Then witnessed them choreograph a 3-minute dance that also represented the water cycle!
The boys created a 3-minute rap on the solar system.
It was brilliant.
They were so proud.
They wanted to put on a show for their school and parents and anyone who would watch.
The teacher said "oh no, that won't happen"
and we said "oh yeah....we're such out of touch artists, we forget normal people are busy at jobs until 5 or 6pm ooops"
she shook her head sadly and said "you think the parents of these kids have JOBS?! nooooooo *angry chuckle* they're not tied up with jobs. they just don't give a damn. nobody cares about these poor kids. they won't come"
I think those 8 weeks were simultaneously the most inspiring and most discouraging of my adult life.
These kids were smarter and harder working than most of the suburban white kids I met while teaching dance...
...and I knew they'd end up, at best, making minimum wages and living in poverty.
Good points made
but Bush's still the devil- hee
----------------- Bulletin Message -----------------
From: jermaine
Date: Sep 7, 2005 6:12 PM
Just PARTIALLY. I mean, he was still on vacation THREE DAYS after the storm hit!!! But anyhoo....
This article is from the editor of The Intellectual Activist (www.TIADaily.com).
He offers the most intellectual point of view so far, which makes sense since he's editor of The Intellectual Activist...
Thoughts?
_________________________________________________
An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State
by Robert Tracinski
Sep 02, 2005
It took four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them, because it also took me four long days to figure out what was going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster.
If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure. For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.
Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists—myself included—did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting.
But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.
The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong.
The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over four days last week. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.
The man-made disaster is the welfare state.
For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in an emergency—indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved in other emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been saying that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even what we expect from a Third World country.
When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize to keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in America. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen this a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and serve as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection) and large ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).
So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?
To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a description from a Washington Times story:
"Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists, knives and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and police and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on.
"The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire....
"Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened Arkansas National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders.
" 'These troops are...under my orders to restore order in the streets,' she said. 'They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will.' "
The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article shows a SWAT team with rifles and armored vests riding on an armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid, listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It looks exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.
What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to speed away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Superdome?
Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?
My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage one night on Fox News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, which is located in the South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one of the largest high-rise public housing projects in America. "The projects," as they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediable squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.)
What Sherri was getting from last night's television coverage was a whiff of the sense of life of "the projects." Then the "crawl"—the informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels—gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75f the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of those who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then told me that early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails—so they just let many of them loose. [Update: I have been searching for news reports on this last story, but I have not been able to confirm it. Instead, I have found numerous reports about the collapse of the corrupt and incompetent New Orleans Police Department; see here and here.]
There is no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations--that is, a large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects, and vice versa.
There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit—but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals—and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep—on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.
All of this is related, incidentally, to the incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. In a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters—not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.
No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example, for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the chaos on American "individualism." But the truth is precisely the opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of individualism.
What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. And they don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.
But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.
People living in piles of their own trash, while petulantly complaining that other people aren't doing enough to take care of them and then shooting at those who come to rescue them—this is not just a description of the chaos at the Superdome. It is a perfect summary of the 40-year history of the welfare state and its public housing projects.
The welfare state—and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages—is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.
06 September 2005
15,000 body bags
My mother is somehow a part of the FEMA team.
She was deployed to Dallas this weekend. Her hours are roughly 4pm-3am.
She's 69
She was told she'd be there for 2 weeks. Now that she's down there, she's been informed she should not expect to return to Chicago for 6 months.
People calling the help lines are not calling for help as much as to scream, curse, cry about how much they hate Bush, the US government, and FEMA.
15,000 body bags were shipped to New Orleans this weekend from the office in Dallas.
Army Corps arrived this weekend in Dallas - 3 of the men were immediately shot dead by angry evacuees/refugees.
She was deployed to Dallas this weekend. Her hours are roughly 4pm-3am.
She's 69
She was told she'd be there for 2 weeks. Now that she's down there, she's been informed she should not expect to return to Chicago for 6 months.
People calling the help lines are not calling for help as much as to scream, curse, cry about how much they hate Bush, the US government, and FEMA.
15,000 body bags were shipped to New Orleans this weekend from the office in Dallas.
Army Corps arrived this weekend in Dallas - 3 of the men were immediately shot dead by angry evacuees/refugees.
02 September 2005
what was washed away, and what remains
by Rabbi David Wolpe
One of the great novels of our time, 'Remembrance of Things Past' is a sustained meditation on the meaning of memory. The author, Marcel Proust, is haunted by memory. His entire artistic life was given to evocations of his past. His work, in several volumes, delicately traces the web of recollection from early childhood. His book is an elegy to a lost world, the world of his youth.
Proust was Jewish, and it is likely that his ancestry sparked some of his obsession with memory. Jews are afflicted by memory, uplifted and impelled by it. To be a Jew is to dote on the past, to understand what has changed; to recognize not only what has been gained, but what has been lost.
Jewish memory teaches us that things do not remain as they were. It helps us overcome the sense of our own invulnerability, and the permanence of the world. It is an early and innocent belief of life that things do not change -- that nothing will fade, or break, or die. That sentiment soon disappears; it roars out of the broken dam of our first tragedy, our first experience with what can never return. Then we remember what was, and in the act of memory is the recognition of loss.
As we grow, we become increasingly aware that life is studded by loss. Some losses are small, inconsequential. Others shake the roots of our lives.
Watching the news this week from a safe niche far from the hurricane, I saw devastating pictures of loss. The most permanent fixtures of being -- homes, businesses, life itself -- were torn away in an instant.
It was an inexplicable burst of tragedy. No answer can magically soothe the scars of desolation. Nonetheless Judaism, with its insistence on memory, provides some context for such a horrible event.
At the Yizkor service on Yom Kippur we mourn the impermanence of life. We speak about the brief years we are granted on earth, how all of our accomplishments are rooted in time. Inevitably, we scan the synagogue for those who worshipped with us last year who are now gone.
Reinforcing the theme of impermanence, Yom Kippur is followed by Sukkot. On Sukkot we read the book of Ecclesiastes, with its insistence on the brevity and evanescence of all things. During that week we also we dwell in a sukkah, a flimsy hut that temporarily serves as a home.
According to Jewish law, a sukkah must not be too sturdy. Building a sukkah is way of saying "You see, our structures are fragile and fleeting. Each year we build them, and a week later we tear them down. That which we imagine will last forever briefly flickers on this earth, and is gone."
Our tradition teaches transience. Do not think that steel and stone will last forever. Loss is ingrained in life. There is a time for everything, the author of Ecclesiastes assures us, which means that there is another time when that thing will be no more.
Yet this teaching of transience is not so that we will be left with despair. It encourages us to search for that which is permanent. The sukkah may be temporary, but the memory of building it has lasted for three-thousand years. Even if individuals forget, the community remembers. And that memory lingers even when more palpable symbols of achievement in this world are gone.
The teaching of Judaism is that while the world changes, there is permanence. There is continuity in memory, in connections between people, in God. Although much in this world might be lost, it is reclaimed through recollection.
Part of the understanding to be wrested from any tragedy is that everything has not been rendered meaningless by loss. Even something so fixed and durable as a home is not ultimately what lasts. The abidingness of life is found in others, and in God. This Yizkor there will be much to mourn for many who have lived through this terrible tragedy. Nothing can obliterate the horrible pain, the sense of life's work having been swept away, the helplessness and violation.
Yet Judaism adjures us to remember that which lasts. It is in our power to ensure that no storm can blow away memory, and no floods wash away faith.
Those of us who only watched the devastation must remember the vivid images of lives upended, dreams shattered, homes and hearts swept up in the storm. Those who lived through it have the far harder task of clinging to what does last: to memory, to hope, to each other, to God. From the rest of us, in the immemorial words of our tradition, chazak, chazak v'titchazek: Stay strong, and may you be strengthened.
One of the great novels of our time, 'Remembrance of Things Past' is a sustained meditation on the meaning of memory. The author, Marcel Proust, is haunted by memory. His entire artistic life was given to evocations of his past. His work, in several volumes, delicately traces the web of recollection from early childhood. His book is an elegy to a lost world, the world of his youth.
Proust was Jewish, and it is likely that his ancestry sparked some of his obsession with memory. Jews are afflicted by memory, uplifted and impelled by it. To be a Jew is to dote on the past, to understand what has changed; to recognize not only what has been gained, but what has been lost.
Jewish memory teaches us that things do not remain as they were. It helps us overcome the sense of our own invulnerability, and the permanence of the world. It is an early and innocent belief of life that things do not change -- that nothing will fade, or break, or die. That sentiment soon disappears; it roars out of the broken dam of our first tragedy, our first experience with what can never return. Then we remember what was, and in the act of memory is the recognition of loss.
As we grow, we become increasingly aware that life is studded by loss. Some losses are small, inconsequential. Others shake the roots of our lives.
Watching the news this week from a safe niche far from the hurricane, I saw devastating pictures of loss. The most permanent fixtures of being -- homes, businesses, life itself -- were torn away in an instant.
It was an inexplicable burst of tragedy. No answer can magically soothe the scars of desolation. Nonetheless Judaism, with its insistence on memory, provides some context for such a horrible event.
At the Yizkor service on Yom Kippur we mourn the impermanence of life. We speak about the brief years we are granted on earth, how all of our accomplishments are rooted in time. Inevitably, we scan the synagogue for those who worshipped with us last year who are now gone.
Reinforcing the theme of impermanence, Yom Kippur is followed by Sukkot. On Sukkot we read the book of Ecclesiastes, with its insistence on the brevity and evanescence of all things. During that week we also we dwell in a sukkah, a flimsy hut that temporarily serves as a home.
According to Jewish law, a sukkah must not be too sturdy. Building a sukkah is way of saying "You see, our structures are fragile and fleeting. Each year we build them, and a week later we tear them down. That which we imagine will last forever briefly flickers on this earth, and is gone."
Our tradition teaches transience. Do not think that steel and stone will last forever. Loss is ingrained in life. There is a time for everything, the author of Ecclesiastes assures us, which means that there is another time when that thing will be no more.
Yet this teaching of transience is not so that we will be left with despair. It encourages us to search for that which is permanent. The sukkah may be temporary, but the memory of building it has lasted for three-thousand years. Even if individuals forget, the community remembers. And that memory lingers even when more palpable symbols of achievement in this world are gone.
The teaching of Judaism is that while the world changes, there is permanence. There is continuity in memory, in connections between people, in God. Although much in this world might be lost, it is reclaimed through recollection.
Part of the understanding to be wrested from any tragedy is that everything has not been rendered meaningless by loss. Even something so fixed and durable as a home is not ultimately what lasts. The abidingness of life is found in others, and in God. This Yizkor there will be much to mourn for many who have lived through this terrible tragedy. Nothing can obliterate the horrible pain, the sense of life's work having been swept away, the helplessness and violation.
Yet Judaism adjures us to remember that which lasts. It is in our power to ensure that no storm can blow away memory, and no floods wash away faith.
Those of us who only watched the devastation must remember the vivid images of lives upended, dreams shattered, homes and hearts swept up in the storm. Those who lived through it have the far harder task of clinging to what does last: to memory, to hope, to each other, to God. From the rest of us, in the immemorial words of our tradition, chazak, chazak v'titchazek: Stay strong, and may you be strengthened.
01 September 2005
the new orleans joke
For YEARS I've heard my friends from Louisiana joke about how the bottom 1/2 of the state would be destroyed by a hurricane because of its dysfunctional system. What's atrocious is the GOVERNMENT had the same theory, had a plan to fix it and the money to prepare the city
and Bush took it away to pay for his war in Iraq
Added note from Governor's press conference right now: "If people had jobs, they don't have jobs anymore. They don't have homes anymore"
SPIEGEL ONLINE - August 31, 2005, 11:22 PMURL: http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,372455,00.html
Former Clinton Advisor "No One Can Say they Didn't See it Coming"
By Sidney Blumenthal
In 2001, FEMA warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S. But the Bush administration cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to pay for the Iraq war.
Biblical in its uncontrolled rage and scope, Hurricane Katrina has left millions of Americans to scavenge for food and shelter and hundreds to thousands reportedly dead. With its main levee broken, the evacuated city of New Orleans has become part of the Gulf of Mexico. But the damage wrought by the hurricane may not entirely be the result of an act of nature. A year ago the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed to study how New Orleans could be protected from a catastrophic hurricane, but the Bush administration ordered that the research not be undertaken. After a flood killed six people in 1995, Congress created the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, in which the Corps of Engineers strengthened and renovated levees and pumping stations.
In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S., including a terrorist attack on New York City. But by 2003 the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war. In 2004, the Bush administration cut funding requested by the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain by more than 80 percent. Additional cuts at the beginning of this year (for a total reduction in funding of 44.2 percent since 2001) forced the New Orleans district of the Corps to impose a hiring freeze. The Senate had debated adding funds for fixing New Orleans' levees, but it was too late. The New Orleans Times-Picayune, which before the hurricane published a series on the federal funding problem, and whose presses are now underwater, reported online: "No one can say they didn't see it coming ... Now in the wake of one of the worst storms ever, serious questions are being asked about the lack of preparation. "The Bush administration's policy of turning over wetlands to developers almost certainly also contributed to the heightened level of the storm surge.
In 1990, a federal task force began restoring lost wetlands surrounding New Orleans. Every two miles of wetland between the Crescent City and the Gulf reduces a surge by half a foot. Bush had promised "no net loss" of wetlands, a policy launched by his father's administration and bolstered by President Clinton. But he reversed his approach in 2003, unleashing the developers. The Army Corps of Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency then announced they could no longer protect wetlands unless they were somehow related to interstate commerce. In response to this potential crisis, four leading environmental groups conducted a joint expert study, concluding in 2004 that without wetlands protection New Orleans could be devastated by an ordinary, much less a Category 4 or 5, hurricane. "There's no way to describe how mindless a policy that is when it comes to wetlands protection," said one of the report's authors. The chairman of the White House's Council on Environmental Quality dismissed the study as "highly questionable," and boasted, "Everybody loves what we're doing."
"My administration's climate change policy will be science based," President Bush declared in June 2001. But in 2002, when the Environmental Protection Agency submitted a study on global warming to the United Nations reflecting its expert research, Bush derided it as "a report put out by a bureaucracy," and excised the climate change assessment from the agency's annual report. The next year, when the EPA issued its first comprehensive "Report on the Environment," stating, "Climate change has global consequences for human health and the environment," the White House simply demanded removal of the line and all similar conclusions.
At the G-8 meeting in Scotland this year, Bush successfully stymied any common action on global warming. Scientists, meanwhile, have continued to accumulate impressive data on the rising temperature of the oceans, which has produced more severe hurricanes. In February 2004, 60 of the nation's leading scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, warned in a statement, "Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policymaking": "Successful application of science has played a large part in the policies that have made the United States of America the world's most powerful nation and its citizens increasingly prosperous and healthy ... Indeed, this principle has long been adhered to by presidents and administrations of both parties in forming and implementing policies. The administration of George W. Bush has, however, disregarded this principle ... The distortion of scientific knowledge for partisan political ends must cease." Bush completely ignored this statement.
In the two weeks preceding the storm in the Gulf, the trumping of science by ideology and expertise by special interests accelerated. The Federal Drug Administration announced that it was postponing sale of the morning-after contraceptive pill, despite overwhelming scientific evidence of its safety and its approval by the FDA's scientific advisory board. The United Nations special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa accused the Bush administration of responsibility for a condom shortage in Uganda -- the result of the administration's evangelical Christian agenda of "abstinence." When the chief of the Bureau of Justice Statistics in the Justice Department was ordered by the White House to delete its study that African-Americans and other minorities are subject to racial profiling in police traffic stops and he refused to buckle under, he was forced out of his job. When the Army Corps of Engineers' chief contracting oversight analyst objected to a $7 billion no-bid contract awarded for work in Iraq to Halliburton (the firm at which Vice President Cheney was formerly CEO), she was demoted despite her superior professional ratings. At the National Park Service, a former Cheney aide, a political appointee lacking professional background, drew up a plan to overturn past environmental practices and prohibit any mention of evolution while allowing sale of religious materials through the Park Service.
On the day the levees burst in New Orleans, Bush delivered a speech in Colorado comparing the Iraq war to World War II and himself to Franklin D. Roosevelt: "And he knew that the best way to bring peace and stability to the region was by bringing freedom to Japan." Bush had boarded his very own "Streetcar Named Desire."
Sidney Blumenthal, a former assistant and senior advisor to President Clinton and the author of "The Clinton Wars," is writing a column for Salon and the Guardian of London.
and Bush took it away to pay for his war in Iraq
Added note from Governor's press conference right now: "If people had jobs, they don't have jobs anymore. They don't have homes anymore"
SPIEGEL ONLINE - August 31, 2005, 11:22 PMURL: http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,372455,00.html
Former Clinton Advisor "No One Can Say they Didn't See it Coming"
By Sidney Blumenthal
In 2001, FEMA warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S. But the Bush administration cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to pay for the Iraq war.
Biblical in its uncontrolled rage and scope, Hurricane Katrina has left millions of Americans to scavenge for food and shelter and hundreds to thousands reportedly dead. With its main levee broken, the evacuated city of New Orleans has become part of the Gulf of Mexico. But the damage wrought by the hurricane may not entirely be the result of an act of nature. A year ago the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed to study how New Orleans could be protected from a catastrophic hurricane, but the Bush administration ordered that the research not be undertaken. After a flood killed six people in 1995, Congress created the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, in which the Corps of Engineers strengthened and renovated levees and pumping stations.
In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S., including a terrorist attack on New York City. But by 2003 the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war. In 2004, the Bush administration cut funding requested by the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain by more than 80 percent. Additional cuts at the beginning of this year (for a total reduction in funding of 44.2 percent since 2001) forced the New Orleans district of the Corps to impose a hiring freeze. The Senate had debated adding funds for fixing New Orleans' levees, but it was too late. The New Orleans Times-Picayune, which before the hurricane published a series on the federal funding problem, and whose presses are now underwater, reported online: "No one can say they didn't see it coming ... Now in the wake of one of the worst storms ever, serious questions are being asked about the lack of preparation. "The Bush administration's policy of turning over wetlands to developers almost certainly also contributed to the heightened level of the storm surge.
In 1990, a federal task force began restoring lost wetlands surrounding New Orleans. Every two miles of wetland between the Crescent City and the Gulf reduces a surge by half a foot. Bush had promised "no net loss" of wetlands, a policy launched by his father's administration and bolstered by President Clinton. But he reversed his approach in 2003, unleashing the developers. The Army Corps of Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency then announced they could no longer protect wetlands unless they were somehow related to interstate commerce. In response to this potential crisis, four leading environmental groups conducted a joint expert study, concluding in 2004 that without wetlands protection New Orleans could be devastated by an ordinary, much less a Category 4 or 5, hurricane. "There's no way to describe how mindless a policy that is when it comes to wetlands protection," said one of the report's authors. The chairman of the White House's Council on Environmental Quality dismissed the study as "highly questionable," and boasted, "Everybody loves what we're doing."
"My administration's climate change policy will be science based," President Bush declared in June 2001. But in 2002, when the Environmental Protection Agency submitted a study on global warming to the United Nations reflecting its expert research, Bush derided it as "a report put out by a bureaucracy," and excised the climate change assessment from the agency's annual report. The next year, when the EPA issued its first comprehensive "Report on the Environment," stating, "Climate change has global consequences for human health and the environment," the White House simply demanded removal of the line and all similar conclusions.
At the G-8 meeting in Scotland this year, Bush successfully stymied any common action on global warming. Scientists, meanwhile, have continued to accumulate impressive data on the rising temperature of the oceans, which has produced more severe hurricanes. In February 2004, 60 of the nation's leading scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, warned in a statement, "Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policymaking": "Successful application of science has played a large part in the policies that have made the United States of America the world's most powerful nation and its citizens increasingly prosperous and healthy ... Indeed, this principle has long been adhered to by presidents and administrations of both parties in forming and implementing policies. The administration of George W. Bush has, however, disregarded this principle ... The distortion of scientific knowledge for partisan political ends must cease." Bush completely ignored this statement.
In the two weeks preceding the storm in the Gulf, the trumping of science by ideology and expertise by special interests accelerated. The Federal Drug Administration announced that it was postponing sale of the morning-after contraceptive pill, despite overwhelming scientific evidence of its safety and its approval by the FDA's scientific advisory board. The United Nations special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa accused the Bush administration of responsibility for a condom shortage in Uganda -- the result of the administration's evangelical Christian agenda of "abstinence." When the chief of the Bureau of Justice Statistics in the Justice Department was ordered by the White House to delete its study that African-Americans and other minorities are subject to racial profiling in police traffic stops and he refused to buckle under, he was forced out of his job. When the Army Corps of Engineers' chief contracting oversight analyst objected to a $7 billion no-bid contract awarded for work in Iraq to Halliburton (the firm at which Vice President Cheney was formerly CEO), she was demoted despite her superior professional ratings. At the National Park Service, a former Cheney aide, a political appointee lacking professional background, drew up a plan to overturn past environmental practices and prohibit any mention of evolution while allowing sale of religious materials through the Park Service.
On the day the levees burst in New Orleans, Bush delivered a speech in Colorado comparing the Iraq war to World War II and himself to Franklin D. Roosevelt: "And he knew that the best way to bring peace and stability to the region was by bringing freedom to Japan." Bush had boarded his very own "Streetcar Named Desire."
Sidney Blumenthal, a former assistant and senior advisor to President Clinton and the author of "The Clinton Wars," is writing a column for Salon and the Guardian of London.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
