Category Archives: Social Science

The Peter Principle Pageant

Dave Haxton posts his thoughts about the Katrina disaster from his perspective as an Asatruar. His “rant” makes some incisive points about competence, politics, and spin. In the effort to provide another perspective as a companion to this post and this one, I provide an excerpt. If it whets your appetite, go read the entire piece.

I agree with Laura Bush on at least one thing: this was not about race. Nor was it about “class”, corruption, voting patterns or religion.

This is about competence. And the United States is seemingly blessed with perhaps the most incompetent set of government officials at all levels of any nation on the planet. We’ve just managed something that I thought was impossible: we made the Soviet response to the Chernobyl disaster look good.

And while there was certainly no lack of stupidity and incompetence on the part of local and state officials, the Bush Administration really does stand out in this regard: because this is but the latest in a long string of idiocies that seem to be it’s hallmark, and will ultimately become it’s legacy.

–Dave Haxton, MacRaven

I don’t agree with everything Dave wrote — in particular, his opinion about how storm victims could have responded to this crisis. If you have strong opinions, he is the best person to engage in discussion with, since he’s the author.

A National Day of Service

It has often been said that Americans were ready to make a genuine sacrifice after 9/11 but that none was ever asked of them. The message from the Bush administration was, essentially, that the best thing we could do was to continue living our normal lives, continue our shopping and debt expansion, and all would be well. It was a way of saying that a certain selfishness was the best method of giving to others. Instead of asking what we could do for our country, the president seemed to suggest that the country would be just fine if we went back to business as usual.

This country repeatedly shows that it responds generously and willingly in times of crisis. Sept. 11 and now Katrina aroused in Americans a profound desire to help out, and many millions of dollars have already been donated to the hurricane recovery effort. And yet that is clearly not enough. There is an unexpressed, unfulfilled appetite in this country to put our hands, and not merely our dollars, to work – not only in emergencies, but in ordinary times as well.

—A Day On

This excerpt was a reader’s opinion submitted to the New York Times. The writer suggests that rather than a day off, Labor Day could become a day of national service stating, “The opportunity to make a meaningful sacrifice lies right in front of us, right around the corner or up the street, every day.”

I like this idea. While it’s nice to have a three day weekend, gathering with others even for a few hours to assist some part of my community appeals, and I would like to see if this sparks interest in others. What do you think?

When In Public

When in public poetry should take off its clothes and wave to the nearest person in sight; it should be seen in the company of thieves and lovers rather than that of journalists and publishers. On sighting mathematicians it should unhook the algebra from their minds and replace it with poetry; on sighting poets it should unhook poetry from their minds and replace it with algebra; it should fall in love with children and woo them with fairytales; it should wait on the landing for 2 years for all its mates to come home then go outside and find them all dead. When the electricity fails it should wear dark glasses and pretend to be blind. It should guide all those who are safe into the middle of busy roads and leave them there. It should scatter woodworm into the bedrooms of all peg-legged men not being afraid to hurt the innocent or make such differences. It should shout EVIL! EVIL! from the roofs of the world’s stock exchanges. It should not pretend to be a clerk or a librarian. It should be kind, it is the eventual sameness of contradictions. It should never weep until it is alone and then only after it has covered the mirrors and sealed up the cracks. Poetry should seek out pale and lyrical couples and wander with them into stables, neglected bedrooms and engineless cars for a final Good Time. It should enter burning factories too late to save anyone. It should pay no attention to its real name. Poetry should be seen lying by the side of road accidents, hissing from unlit gasrings. It should scrawl the nymphomaniac’s secret on her teacher’s blackboard; offer her a worm saying: Inside this is a tiny apple. Poetry should play hopscotch in the 6pm streets and look for jinks in other people’s dustbins. At dawn it should leave the bedroom and catch the first bus home to its wife. At dusk it should chat up a girl nobody wants. It should be seen standing on the ledge of a skyscraper, on a bridge with a brick tied around its heart. It is the monster hiding in a child’s dark room, it is the scar on a beautiful man’s face. It is the last blade of grass being picked from the city park.

—Brian Patten

Blame the Victim

This excerpt features quotes of Mike Brown, the director of FEMA. Italicized words are my emphasis.

(CNN) — The director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency said Thursday those New Orleans residents who chose not to heed warnings to evacuate before Hurricane Katrina bear some responsibility for their fates.

Michael Brown also agreed with other public officials that the death toll in the city could reach into the thousands.

“Unfortunately, that’s going to be attributable a lot to people who did not heed the advance warnings,” Brown told CNN.

“I don’t make judgments about why people chose not to leave but, you know, there was a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans,” he said.

“And to find people still there is just heart-wrenching to me because, you know, the mayor did everything he could to get them out of there.

—Victims Bear Some Responsibility, CNN

Um, gee. He doesn’t make judgments? Well, blaming the victims is exactly that. Apparently it doesn’t occur to him that the majority of those who didn’t evacuate were poor or infirm, or people caring for the infirm, or tourists. Many did not have the means — whether it was money, transportation, a destination, or all of these reasons. Even tourists. Imagine having flown in and not rented a car. Do you think you would have been able to arrange a flight out of the city last minute?

And no, the mayor did not do all that could be done to evacuate people. It’s not him personally, though; anyone in that position probably would have fallen short. Resources exist that weren’t utilized, because evacuation planners simply have never considered them. For instance, there were many buses (city, school) that could have been used to transport people out. However, where would they go? Disaster planning has got to include strategies to transport and care for displaced persons without money or with special medical needs. What we have learned from Katrina (I hope) is that this “every man for himself” method of evacuation is unacceptable. And now, policymakers and planners need to apply their brainpower so it doesn’t happen again.

Examining Gulf Region Income By Race

Comments to this post inspired me to dig a little deeper about income in the Gulf region. Here is information for the New Orleans, Louisiana Income from the 2000 Census. The city population in 2000 was 484,674. Below that is the data for Gulfport, Mississippi, population 71,127 and Biloxi, Mississippi, population 50,644.

Per capita income by Race or Ethnicity New Orleans Louisiana United States
Per Capita Income $17,258 $16,912 $21,587
White 31,971 20,488 23,918
Black or African American 11,332 10,166 14,437
Native American 13,528 12,908 12,893
Asian 13,826 16,304 21,823
Native Hawaiian and Pacific islander 18,153 14,975 15,054
Some other race 13,543 13,759 10,813
Two or more races 14,321 12,741 13,405
Hispanic or Latino 16,151 15,105 12,111
Per capita income by Race or Ethnicity Gulfport Mississippi United States
Per capita income $17,554 $15,853 $21,587
White 21,258 19,387 23,918
Black or African American 11,297 10,042 14,437
Native American 16,664 11,726 12,893
Asian 18,387 17,504 21,823
Native Hawaiian and Pacific islander 13,207 19,794 15,054
Some other race 11,125 10,868 10,813
Two or more races 9,749 12,373 13,405
Hispanic or Latino 13,256 12,549 12,111
Per capita income by Race or Ethnicity Biloxi Mississippi United States
Per capita income $17,809 $15,853 $21,587
White 19,839 19,387 23,918
Black or African American 13,158 10,042 14,437
Native American 18,519 11,726 12,893
Asian 13,073 17,504 21,823
Native Hawaiian and Pacific islander 30,938 19,794 15,054
Some other race 13,071 10,868 10,813
Two or more races 8,171 12,373 13,405
Hispanic or Latino 13,101 12,549 12,111

Those wishing to comment may do so in the comments section of this post.

Its Bitterness Is Sweet

I wonder if the president is getting enough coffee. He seems like he’s just not that into being president. I don’t mean this to be critical in any way, but there is a dimness about the man that suggests a need for caffeine. It is not enough simply to refrain from adultery and tax increases and make the occasional trip to Idaho to announce that we are winning the war in Iraq. It’s the French who take the whole month of August off, Mr. President. That’s not us. Americans are not idlers and layabouts and feather merchants, we’re strivers and pluggers and we welcome adversity, so long as we have coffee. Its bitterness is sweet to us.

–Garrison Keillor, Mitigating Life’s Daily Grind

The media continues to mention how Bush cut his vacation short, but to this I say, “Big whoop.” He cut it short by two days, as he should. Why make a big deal of the president fulfilling duties that his position requires?

Hmm. Usually this blog is not so negatively focused. I am struggling to manage my internal responses to all this. My husband, bless him, does not understand this part of me very well. He suggests that I “feast on” the negativity, that I do it “everytime” there’s a major disaster, such as 9/11 or the Asian tsunami. What is so hard to convey is that I grieve, despite the fact I’m relatively distant from the event. It is not morbidity that drives me. It is a sense of connection with humanity. I know life must go on. People must work, do chores, and need to have a little fun. And I will. Just not right now, not this week. Don’t the refugees and the victims deserve that small amount of my attention, care, and prayer? Grief is part of life. What I don’t understand is how we can give it so little acknowledgment and room in our lives. Like coffee, its bitterness is sweet.

But considering eight of my last ten posts were about this catastrophe, perhaps I ought to take a step back, away from this outlet, and experience my mourning in private.

Yes, I’ve Noticed This Too

The victims, they note, were largely black and poor, those who toiled in the background of the tourist havens, living in tumbledown neighborhoods that were long known to be vulnerable to disaster if the levees failed. Without so much as a car or bus fare to escape ahead of time, they found themselves left behind by a failure to plan for their rescue should the dreaded day ever arrive.

“If you know that terror is approaching in terms of hurricanes, and you’ve already seen the damage they’ve done in Florida and elsewhere, what in God’s name were you thinking?” said the Rev. Calvin O. Butts III, pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. “I think a lot of it has to do with race and class. The people affected were largely poor people. Poor, black people.”

… Among the messages and essays circulating in cyberspace that lament the lost lives and missed opportunities is one by Mark Naison, a white professor of African-American Studies at Fordham University in the Bronx.

“Is this what the pioneers of the civil rights movement fought to achieve, a society where many black people are as trapped and isolated by their poverty as they were by segregation laws?” Mr. Naison wrote. “If Sept. 11 showed the power of a nation united in response to a devastating attack, Hurricane Katrina reveals the fault lines of a region and a nation, rent by profound social divisions.”

—From the Margins of Society to the Center of Tragedy, New York Times

Dante’s Inferno

The bathrooms, clogged and overflowing since Monday, announced the second level of hell, the walkway ringing the entrance level. In the men’s, the urinal troughs were overflowing. In the women’s, the bowls were to the brim. A slime of excrement and urine made the walkway slick. “You don’t even go there anymore,” said Dee Ford, 37, who was pushed in a wading pool from her flooded house to the shelter. “You just go somewhere in a corner where you can. In the dark, you are going to step in poo anyway.”

Water and electricity both failed Monday, and three pumps to pressurize plumbing have been no match “when the lake just keeps pushing it back at us,” said Maj. Ed Bush, the chief public affairs officer for the Louisiana National Guard.

“With no hand-washing, and all the excrement,” said Sgt. Debra Williams, who was staffing the infirmary in the adjacent sports arena, “you have about four days until dysentery sets in. And it’s been four days today.”

Bottled water was too precious to use for washing; adults get two bottles a day. Food, mostly Meals Ready-to-Eat, is dispensed in a different line. Many refugees told of waiting in line for hours only to be told no food was left.

…Walking about the perimeter of the Superdome, in brilliant sunshine and blistering heat, [Major Ed] Bush could take no more than a few steps before angry and pleading residents clutched at him. An elderly woman could not get her thyroid medicine; another needed dialysis. A 3-week-old baby, clad only in a diaper, lay listless in her young mother’s arm. She had a fever.

…The president and the governor both asserted Wednesday that everyone would be moving to a spiffier football stadium. But although Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco had announced at 11 a.m. a plan to evacuate the Superdome to Houston’s Astrodome, Maj. Bush had received no information through mid-afternoon. By his estimate about 15,000 people remained in the Superdome, and more straggled in through the day, either wading in on foot or dropped off by a helicopter rescue effort that so far has plucked 3,000 people from the roofs of flooded homes.

…”This is mass chaos,” said Sgt. Jason Defess, 27, a National Guard military policeman who had been stationed on a ramp outside the Superdome since Monday. “To tell you the truth, I’d rather be in Iraq,” where he was deployed for 14 months, until January. “You got your constant danger, but I had something to protect myself. [And] three meals a day. Communications. A plan. Here, they had no plan.”

—‘And Now We Are in Hell’, Washington Post

At least seven bodies were scattered outside the convention center, a makeshift staging area for those rescued from rooftops, attics and highways. The sidewalks were packed with people without food, water or medical care, and with no sign of law enforcement.

An old man in a chaise lounge lay dead in a grassy median as hungry babies wailed around him. Around the corner, an elderly woman lay dead in her wheelchair, covered up by a blanket, and another body lay beside her wrapped in a sheet.

…”We’ve got people dying out here — two babies have died, a woman died, a man died,” said Helen Cheek. “We haven’t had no food, we haven’t had no water, we haven’t had nothing. They just brought us here and dropped us.”

Tourist Debbie Durso of Washington, Mich., said she asked a police officer for assistance and his response was, “‘Go to hell — it’s every man for himself.'”

“This is just insanity,” she said. “We have no food, no water … all these trucks and buses go by and they do nothing but wave.”

—New Orleans in Anarchy With Fights, Rapes, San Francisco Chronicle

How? How? HOW can this be? We are a world superpower with well-developed technology and the best-equipped military, yet we can’t deploy these effectively in the service of rescuing our own citizens? I realize the city is a fishbowl of water, but criminey, we have rugged machines built to withstand that and more. They need to send more equipment. More guardsmen or troops should be stationed there to restore some order and move people. And how can it be that the vulnerable, the immobile, who need special transport by helicopter, are abandoned while able-bodied people are allowed to get on buses? It’s said that communications are spotty. Yet our military possesses the ability to communicate in primitive conditions. Why aren’t these in use?

The mayor and governor are trying to cope and are doing the best they can, but this is not enough. While this is an unprecedented disaster, plans should have been in place to handle it, and assistance should have been mobilized more quickly two days ago. Even the best-laid plans may not be perfect, but at least they would exist and provide a starting point. Seems that there weren’t any at all.

I am truly appalled. I grieve. I cannot personally go in there and help, so I’m doing my part with donations. (Writing about it is a coping method, and the questions I pose are rhetorical. I’m not looking for discussion, which is why the comments are absent for this post.)

Far and Wide

Susan at Easy Bake Coven writes that some North Carolina gas stations are tapped out. Katrina created problems with the state gas pipeline. The media proclaims the dire economic consequences this country will likely experience for some time. [Update, 12:20 a.m. Thu.: The above information is apparently rooted in rumor. See Snopes.com for clarification on gas price and supply rumors.]

Fran at Sacred Ordinary points to an article on BeliefNet that asks the question, Did God Send the Hurricane?. The article examines the question from both the liberal and conservative view: Mother Earth is communicating her pain and we are paying for our environmental disregard vs. the Apocalypse has started and God is punishing America for its sins.

The desperate wish for meaning drives humans to believe odd things. Why anthropomorphize the earth? Why try to put a limiting concept such as God on the universe? (If there is a God, whatever humans conceive cannot match what such a Being really Is. Some people try to accommodate this by believing in many gods and goddesses that represent the facets of the divine. Even so, these are merely symbols of the indescribable.) What happened was a natural event. Disasters have occurred for millenia, much longer than human life has existed. The hurricane may in part be due to global warming, something humankind has generated; the impact it has had on New Orleans is surely due to our manipulation of the land, which made the city vulnerable. This situation is dire, tragic, daunting. Now let’s spend less time examining our collective navel about why and start activating ourselves to help the victims. If you need motivation, listen to this radio essay by Andrei Codrescu, an immigrant poet who has called New Orleans home for 20 years.

Katrina Flood Aid: Each Dollar Brings 15 Meals To The Table

Second only to breathable air, people need food and water to remain alive. (They need clothes and shelter, of course, but air, food, and water are critical to basic survival.) America’s Second Harvest, the nation’s food-bank network, is calling for help. Donations to assist the victims of Hurricane Katrina can be made by clicking this link. It will provide instructions on how to give donations by phone, snail mail, or online. Ninety-eight percent of all donations go directly towards feeding hungry people rather than administration or fundraising.

Please help. Any amount will make a difference.

Via: Instapundit
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International Blog Day

In an effort to expand my playground and encounter the joy of discovery, I’m participating in International Blog Day. Writer Nir Ofir noticed that the date looked an awful lot like the word blog, at least the way he and millions of other non-Americans write it: 3108 —> Blog. Okay, maybe a bit of a stretch, but an original idea. So today, 8/31, is a day to share new blog gems.

  • One Word: a Perioperative nurse in Boston, MA, “wanted to write 52 essays, one a week for a year.” The essays reminisce about her childhood and contemplate topics such as chaos, suffering, words, joy, color, her search for meaning, and her experience of her body. She also includes photos. I sense we are similar in age, and I enjoy her voice.
  • Dakota: this blog has one aim — to present photos, links, and poetry. It does not distract itself with links to other blogs. It simply is. What I find most fascinating are the poems in which some words are links. It provides another dimension to the poem.
  • Book of Kells: Kelli Russell Agodon is a Washington state poet. Her blog features snippets about her life as a poet, links to poetry-related and literary news, and an extensive list of poetry bloggers. She also practices gratitude and occasionally posts a “gratitude list,” something I do in my private journal.
  • Surrender, Dorothy: the only description in her “About Me” section is a quote: “A poet should be as sensitive as an aching tooth.” –Anna Swir She posts her poems and writes about the writing life, as well as the human life as experienced by a writer. She also once feared spiders and now takes extra care to be kind to them, a transformation I understand.
  • Land Mammal: The subtitle is “Feeding the Beast.” Written by Anne Haines, I was drawn to the blog because she describes herself in a way I connect with: “Mid-forties… poet-librarygirl-nerd.” And she has two cats! The blog features her poetry.

My interests lean toward a certain writing genre these days. Even if you don’t read poetry, take a peek at these blogs. Not all the posts are poems or about poetry. These are women with strong voices and rich inner lives.

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Website: Blogday.org