Month: September 2005

For those who don’t know, I work part-time taking road service calls at AAA. I just now got a call from a panicked person saying he heard that there was no more gas left in Florida, and he wanted me to confirm that rumor.

I have more half-baked thoughts swimming around my head in the wake of the response to Katrina. I can’t help but think, what happens when breakdown of society is nationwide, or even global? How will we survive when there is no one to bring us aid?

When it comes to survival under duress, when infrastructure has been destroyed, capitalism is an abstraction that gets in the way. When society breaks down, no one will care about $100 bills, credit cards, expense accounts, fancy cars with no gas to operate them, or cavernous mansions with no food or running water. What will matter is not marketing degrees, but rather real ability to survive, to find and procure food and water, to build shelter, and to defend yourself and your loved ones.

This pacifist is in a quandary about whether or not violence is justified to defend oneself, one’s loved ones, one’s community, in the chaos of a disaster. Normally I will eschew violence. But I cannot say what I would do if someone threatened my family, my child, in the course of a disaster (or in any other context for that matter). Given this, can I truly call myself a pacifist? Even Buddhist monks learn to defend themselves. The larger question: Is violence and taking advantage of the weak part of human nature? Or is it an artifict of oppression and/or capitalist slavery? My first thought is that there are more powerful tools, in the long run, than firearms. It seems to me that my best bet for survival is to shine my light bright and not fight, unless absolutely necessary. And even if I do find a need to fight, it should be from a place of compassion, as the person picking a fight with me would clearly be doing so because of suffering.

Is the US response to Katrina informing The Terrorists(tm) about our weaknesses in the event of a catastrophic attack? Let’s take the BuShites at face value, and assume that there are thousands of Evil Terrorists(tm) conspiring to bring down America. Well, I’m sure they are watching and chuckling at our pathetic and scatterbrained attempts to help our own people in their time of need. If their goal truly is to kill as many Americans as possible, I’m sure the US government’s response to Katrina is most edifying to them.

What happened to Donald Rumsfeld’s vision of an agile military able to deploy quickly anywhere on the globe? Well, not if actual Americans are in need… our troops are too busy asserting control over global oil production. In addition, what about the federal funding diverted from reinforcing the New Orleans levees due to high costs of Iraq war?

Like so many people, my mind is reeling from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I have several thoughts bubbling. In no particular order:

The US Government does not now have, and arguably never has had, helping people in need as its primary focus. As if there were any doubt (not in my head), the response to this disaster should make that point clear. Helping people is just simply not it’s job. After all this talk about “protecting the homeland” and all the government machinations of the past 4 years, the attempt to bring help is slow, muddled, delayed, confused when people actually need it.

Simplified categorization of people has got to go. In this case, I’m referring specifically to Bush’s zero tolerance for looters policy. Of course, the BuShites have historically had trouble categorizing people, as “looters,” “terrorists,” “enemy combatants,” “detainees,” etc etc. But in the wake of such a horrid tragedy, to include people taking food to feed their families in such a draconian plan, is just silly and uncompassionate. But it’s even more evidence that the government is in place to protect corporate interests more than anything.

Racism is at work in the aftermath of Katrina. Look at the pictures coming out of New Orleans. Most of the photos I’ve seen are black “refugees”; there are very few white refugees in most of the photos I’ve seen. Of course, it’s not so much a racial divide as it is an economic one; though that particular issue is clouded because black people tend to be poorer than white people. But for a distressingly vivid illustration of how racism is working, I direct you to how the AP describes white people “finding” things and black people “looting” things.

This gas price spike is just the beginning. Oil prices are just going to keep rising until there is no more oil. Deal with it. Accept it. You can’t deny it’s true. We are past the point of peak oil; it’s all downhill from here. The only question is how badly society crashes and burns until we work out new means of transporting goods and people that don’t involve dead dinosaurs.

Links and multimedia potpourri. There is a good collection of photographs on the NOLA site. Wikipedia (what an amazing resource that is…I can’t imagine what it will look like in a decade) already has a Katrina page. This is the most interesting blog from New Orleans that I’ve seen; run by a guy who has an ISP at the top of a New Orleans high rise. Though he doesn’t appear to be directly involved, there are some exquisite rants from Bob Harris.

…it’s highly significant that Massachussetts is thinking of switching all its computers to Free software, including Linux desktops and OpenOffice (or more specifically, to programs that use the OASIS OpenDocument format). Very cool, a small candle in a sea of darkness.

You can hear for yourself (mp3 player required).

And, just to clarify for the mainstream news media hounds, chaos and disorder and mayhem IS NOT THE SAME as anarchy. Please get it straight.

Clearly the topic of the day is Hurricane Katrina. But first, some context. Over the weekend, I had heard that the storm was heading inland and that New Orleans (among other towns) were, more or less, bracing for impact. So with that in mind, on Monday I headed north to a good friend’s camp, to hang out, let the kids run around, and help with some minor construction work.

So I remained largely ignorant of the impact and devastation of this storm. It wasn’t until a telephone call with my obviously shaken wife on Wednesday that it began to dawn on me how bad things are getting. entire towns have been wiped of the map; millions of people are now homeless; the sporting goods (ie, gun) section of Wal Marts are being looted; martial law has been declared; 80% of New Orleans is underwater. The list goes on and on. Total devastation, and the chaos that goes hand-in-hand with a population of house-pet automatons, utterly ill-equipped to deal with such devastation.

I have long been convinced that society as we in fat America know it cannot sustain itself. I don’t mean to be “gloom and doom” here, but the fact is, our lifestyle of extravagance, cars, cheap and plentiful produce in February, has a cost. And we are beginning to see some of the evidence of this cost. Ironically, many Americans believe that this cost is measured by the immediate impact of Katrina upon gas prices. This of course is short-sighted at best. America’s (and the world’s) addiction to petroleum may well be the direct cause of Katrina, not to mention last year’s tsunami, the terror attacks of 9/11, and who knows what other cataclysms of tomorrow.

The question in my mind is not if, but when our social structure collapses, and how I and those close to me will deal with said collapse. I have no doubt that it will get ugly, especially when Americans so deeply rooted in gun culture will release their fear, anger, and desperation through violence.

The martial law bit worries me, for what I hope are obvious reasons to any of my readers. Things Political continue to spiral downward, where those in power seek to consolidate that power in response to tragedy, riding the crest of untold suffering.