My shiny little online spot to help y'all keep track of me while I galavant around London.

Sunday, September 04, 2005

New Orleans

A quick rant while I wait for everyone else to get up/get ready:

This mess in New Orleans (and everywhere else around there)... how could that happen in the US? I mean, if a country that rich, with the biggest army in the world, and more supplies than they'd ever need, can't handle a hurricane that they knew was coming...well, how scary is that? Of course, it could just be bad planning. But how stupid do you have to be to not be mobilizing boats and rescue operations towards the area before the storm hits? I know, I know, no one thought the levees would burst. But still: a level 5 hurricane (what they were expecting) is gonna be a bitch whether the levees go or not.

And all the stories coming out, about the murders, rapes and everything else, even scarier. Why do people get like this? I really don't understand how someone could take a natural disaster as their chance to get away with raping teenagers in bathrooms and beating people to death. What the hell is wrong with people? I've always contended that people are just people, and we're all the same, but maybe I'm wrong.

From Christine Blatchford's story in the Globe and Mail:

Two young girls were apparently raped in one or another of the bathrooms; there are reports a 13-year-old boy was also raped, his throat slit; and two days ago, when the felicitously named Regina Hamilton was parking her car on the second floor of a downtown garage, to keep it safe, she was carjacked by an armed man who then began to paw her. "Please," she whimpered, "not after everything else." He grabbed her hard on one arm, rape his clear intent, and Mrs. Hamilton slipped from his grasp and jumped to the ground below, snapping both ankles in the process.

She was crawling, painfully, back to the convention centre when two young men in a golf cart saw her and came to her rescue.


No matter how much money Bush sends now, there isn't anything in the world that's going to make it up to that woman and all the others.

On a total other note: every time I see headlines or footage about this, the Tragically Hip song comes into my head. I can't help it. I fell terrible, but damn: "New Orleans is sinking man, and I don't wanna swim."

On that note, I'm going back to writing posts about MTM visiting...

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

It's funny that you should mention the Hip song. Radio stations across Canada have pulled the song from their playlists this week as a sign of respect. While I appreciate the gesture, I'm always of two minds whenever radio stations do this kind of thing after a natural disaster. On the one hand, it's respectful. One other other hand, by announcing the decision (which seems like a roundabout way of calling attention to their own sensitivity and good taste, which then totally defeats the point), they point out and in fact draw further attention to the inappropriate nature of certain songs at certain times. Any bad feelings that would have been stirred up by playing the song are instead stirred up by the thought of not playing the song.
And then there are those strange remixes of a hit pop song with excerpts from news reports. The juxtaposition of crass, commercial radio with descriptions of the tragedy always feel tasteless to me. As if we needed a soundtrack to the grief and pain.
Anyway, just some thoughts. Hope everyone's having a good time on your trip.

Mary

4/9/05

 

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