My foot is sore from the edge to the middle of the front of the foot.
Technically it is the metatarsal and proximal phalange region on the exterior of the right foot. The sensation is of a tightening of the tissue, perhaps the peroneus brevis tendon is involved. THere is no sense of warmth. It hurts to walk, and in fact the knee and pelvis seem slightly involved, such that the foot splays out to the right, and it takes an effort to turn my toes toward the front, which also increases the pain. It is not the joint between the metatarsal and proximal phalange...it is the tissue in that area that is painful.
There is a sense of strain or swelling and a tendency toward cramping in my adductor muscle in the back of my thigh. If I leave my leg partially bent in one angle for a period of a few minutes it starts to ache. This necessitates the constant repositioning of my foot and leg.
28.9.05
9.9.05
Corpses, Guns Found in New Orleans Homes - Yahoo! News
Corpses and guns are being found in the search for Katrina survivors.
Rescue workers searching the White House for signs of survivors of the Katrina disaster said they had several incidents where workers thought they found humans, but found only press releases, campaign promises, the skeletal remains of political careers and a lot of low-caliber political guns and ammunition, instead. Local District of Columbia authorities explained their reluctance to come to the aid of White House residents during the fiasco as a "misunderstanding about jurisdiction." "We thought they were in charge," explained D.C. Mayor Anthony A. Williams.
White House residents were forced to survive on dwindling stores of bottled arrogance and freeze-dried political entitlements while waiting for the door-to-door search teams to rescue them.
Guard teams assigned to assess the White House expected to meet some resistance from armed looters of the National Treasury holed up in the famous edifice. "There was evidence of looting, and some disturbing indications of ritual sacrafice, but we don't think anyone survived." said John Doe, head of the Guard team assigned the grisly detail.
Rescue workers searching the White House for signs of survivors of the Katrina disaster said they had several incidents where workers thought they found humans, but found only press releases, campaign promises, the skeletal remains of political careers and a lot of low-caliber political guns and ammunition, instead. Local District of Columbia authorities explained their reluctance to come to the aid of White House residents during the fiasco as a "misunderstanding about jurisdiction." "We thought they were in charge," explained D.C. Mayor Anthony A. Williams.
White House residents were forced to survive on dwindling stores of bottled arrogance and freeze-dried political entitlements while waiting for the door-to-door search teams to rescue them.
Guard teams assigned to assess the White House expected to meet some resistance from armed looters of the National Treasury holed up in the famous edifice. "There was evidence of looting, and some disturbing indications of ritual sacrafice, but we don't think anyone survived." said John Doe, head of the Guard team assigned the grisly detail.
2.9.05
Tens of thousands remind us of civil order despite our fantastic incompetence
The headlines should read simply "Tens of thousands keep their cool while being starved, baked, and ignored."
Someone started a web site yesterday for helping homeless people connect with those who have homes. It got hundreds of offers in a few hours. A web site can be set up any where to help anyone anywhere. That is what the internet is.
What needs to be done? What can I do?
I know from my stint in the Urban Studies curriculum at the U last year that schools are not turning out the kind of people who can handle this kind of disaster. In fact, the anal-retentive approach to screening out talent that the University evidenced, leads me to speculate that schools over the last two decades have been part of the problem: certifying "leadership" to compliant personality types who do not know how to bust out of their "organizational trance" and actually get things done goddamn it.
The infrastructure of rescue that descended upon New Orleans was too thin and too light, and it was in a trance. THe media have finally taken the role of shaking some sense into them, slapping them and trying to wake them up from the affectless state of compliance to "higher ups" that makes good on-the-ground improvisation almost impossible.
We did so well in WWII. And no one had college degrees then. McNamara changed all that, of course, bringing his Operations Research approach to the craft of war. Didn't go so well, but sure made for some amazing stories and photos of napalmed children.
We have finally brought Viet Nam all the way home. We have been desperate to do this for the entire adult life of the boom babies. And now its here.
So lets move ahead. Who has the street smarts to make things work on the streets? People on the streets. The leadership that could emerge from this fiasco is moving bodies out of the way and carrying the air mattresses and rounding up insulin sharing groups and busting open vending machines. Right now. In the teeth of hell.
The only problem is these leaders look like the "problem" population, and the "rescuers" can't tell the good peeps in the melee from the bad peeps. The wrong people are making the judgment about when to stop and when to start, where to direct things, what to commandeer and what to give out. But there is no "interface" that enables the white educated prudent well-meaning military and quasi-military and police guys. There is no "riot vision" glasses they can put on to discern the strong and resolute and generous of spirit among the helpless and ill and angry...
So it is a binary fiasco of all or nothing, now or never, everyone or nobody.
What would help the front line troops trying to help, help?
They need locals. They need to invest local leaders with the command power to decide when to ignore randome bullets, when to plow ahead, when to zig and when to zag.
How can they find these leaders and enable them?
And, more remotely, is there a role the internet can play in this?
Someone started a web site yesterday for helping homeless people connect with those who have homes. It got hundreds of offers in a few hours. A web site can be set up any where to help anyone anywhere. That is what the internet is.
What needs to be done? What can I do?
I know from my stint in the Urban Studies curriculum at the U last year that schools are not turning out the kind of people who can handle this kind of disaster. In fact, the anal-retentive approach to screening out talent that the University evidenced, leads me to speculate that schools over the last two decades have been part of the problem: certifying "leadership" to compliant personality types who do not know how to bust out of their "organizational trance" and actually get things done goddamn it.
The infrastructure of rescue that descended upon New Orleans was too thin and too light, and it was in a trance. THe media have finally taken the role of shaking some sense into them, slapping them and trying to wake them up from the affectless state of compliance to "higher ups" that makes good on-the-ground improvisation almost impossible.
We did so well in WWII. And no one had college degrees then. McNamara changed all that, of course, bringing his Operations Research approach to the craft of war. Didn't go so well, but sure made for some amazing stories and photos of napalmed children.
We have finally brought Viet Nam all the way home. We have been desperate to do this for the entire adult life of the boom babies. And now its here.
So lets move ahead. Who has the street smarts to make things work on the streets? People on the streets. The leadership that could emerge from this fiasco is moving bodies out of the way and carrying the air mattresses and rounding up insulin sharing groups and busting open vending machines. Right now. In the teeth of hell.
The only problem is these leaders look like the "problem" population, and the "rescuers" can't tell the good peeps in the melee from the bad peeps. The wrong people are making the judgment about when to stop and when to start, where to direct things, what to commandeer and what to give out. But there is no "interface" that enables the white educated prudent well-meaning military and quasi-military and police guys. There is no "riot vision" glasses they can put on to discern the strong and resolute and generous of spirit among the helpless and ill and angry...
So it is a binary fiasco of all or nothing, now or never, everyone or nobody.
What would help the front line troops trying to help, help?
They need locals. They need to invest local leaders with the command power to decide when to ignore randome bullets, when to plow ahead, when to zig and when to zag.
How can they find these leaders and enable them?
And, more remotely, is there a role the internet can play in this?
1.9.05
I am not satisfied being pissed off at Bush for condemning thousands to at least a prolonged horrorshow, if not sickness, dehumanization and possible death.
I am not satisfied choking back tears as I watch, not just young mothers, but serious young black men speak out for the children in their charge...or absolutely stunned innocent tourists and bystanders who didn't imagine something like this could suddenly develop in a matter of a few hours, a few days, in America.
I am not satisfied with the admirable efforts of some few journalists to get the administration and military spokesmen out of their trances with simple facts: 2000 people in the convention center down the street from the superdome, and those people have no food or water for 5 days. Nothing....while Chertoff asserts that there are staging areas of food and water within walking distance of any survivors now, and they will all be fine by this weekend if they just quit shooting at the rescuers.
I am not satisfied with the feeling inside me that the America I have always hoped was there, has never been there. Not for anyone.
No less a philosopher than Charles Manson predicted that America would come apart along a racial fault line within our life times...his vision of Helter Skelter was no doubt honed in the prisons and juvenile halls of the southeast, where he was from.
It was Manson's vision that came back to haunt me as I watched television today, and saw the way that the black population was being depicted, utterly without dignity. Even the well-meaning reporters focused on the children's helplessness, not on the parent's dignity or strength.
I could imagine the anger rise in thousands of black men and women across the country as they saw what was being done to their people, officially and unofficially, on purpose and unconsciously, reduced to something less than Rwandan refugees, something less than the cattle washed inland in Sumatra. If there isn't a new political movement comes out of this within 6 months, I will be very surprised.
This is the turning point, or more fashionably, the tipping point. The precarious illusions of a whole nation have depended upon a spun sugar foundation of lies, lies about compassion, dignity, and the value of human life. We have let Katrina take out Bush's trash. And the nation that accepts that action, is not the America I was prepared to die in all this time.
But I am not satisfied with my own dissatisfaction. How have I contributed to this mess? Where could I have put a foot down or raised a voice that might have rippled through time and contributed somehow to a stronger edifice of human values than we see washed up at our feet today?
What really matters? The survivors say that they are grateful for their health, their lives, and their status and possessions don't count. The fact is that six months from now, when they find out they have been put in steerage and the entryways have all been locked on them, as the ship goes down, they will not be grateful. The blacks who see their people treated like expendable "assets" in the military jargon of the day, they will not be grateful.
The smart white kids and anyone with a heart will not be grateful for a society sliced up the belly. A society skinned and quartered not by a muggers knife, not by an act of god, but by the timidity and self absorption of a generation of leaders. They are mostly men, but women too, who have forgotten that courage is more important than prudence in the securing of human dignity against neglect, in the protection of the human spirit against corruption.
Without courage, no other quality can be put into play. We have shipped our courage off to suffer faceless conscription in the foreign puzzle of Iraq, and at home we wring our hands or hide behind the glowing phosphor of the lie machine.
I have seen some courage today among survivors in New Orleans. It is on the other side of the mountain. It isn't mine, and I don't feel satisfied at all.
I am not satisfied choking back tears as I watch, not just young mothers, but serious young black men speak out for the children in their charge...or absolutely stunned innocent tourists and bystanders who didn't imagine something like this could suddenly develop in a matter of a few hours, a few days, in America.
I am not satisfied with the admirable efforts of some few journalists to get the administration and military spokesmen out of their trances with simple facts: 2000 people in the convention center down the street from the superdome, and those people have no food or water for 5 days. Nothing....while Chertoff asserts that there are staging areas of food and water within walking distance of any survivors now, and they will all be fine by this weekend if they just quit shooting at the rescuers.
I am not satisfied with the feeling inside me that the America I have always hoped was there, has never been there. Not for anyone.
No less a philosopher than Charles Manson predicted that America would come apart along a racial fault line within our life times...his vision of Helter Skelter was no doubt honed in the prisons and juvenile halls of the southeast, where he was from.
It was Manson's vision that came back to haunt me as I watched television today, and saw the way that the black population was being depicted, utterly without dignity. Even the well-meaning reporters focused on the children's helplessness, not on the parent's dignity or strength.
I could imagine the anger rise in thousands of black men and women across the country as they saw what was being done to their people, officially and unofficially, on purpose and unconsciously, reduced to something less than Rwandan refugees, something less than the cattle washed inland in Sumatra. If there isn't a new political movement comes out of this within 6 months, I will be very surprised.
This is the turning point, or more fashionably, the tipping point. The precarious illusions of a whole nation have depended upon a spun sugar foundation of lies, lies about compassion, dignity, and the value of human life. We have let Katrina take out Bush's trash. And the nation that accepts that action, is not the America I was prepared to die in all this time.
But I am not satisfied with my own dissatisfaction. How have I contributed to this mess? Where could I have put a foot down or raised a voice that might have rippled through time and contributed somehow to a stronger edifice of human values than we see washed up at our feet today?
What really matters? The survivors say that they are grateful for their health, their lives, and their status and possessions don't count. The fact is that six months from now, when they find out they have been put in steerage and the entryways have all been locked on them, as the ship goes down, they will not be grateful. The blacks who see their people treated like expendable "assets" in the military jargon of the day, they will not be grateful.
The smart white kids and anyone with a heart will not be grateful for a society sliced up the belly. A society skinned and quartered not by a muggers knife, not by an act of god, but by the timidity and self absorption of a generation of leaders. They are mostly men, but women too, who have forgotten that courage is more important than prudence in the securing of human dignity against neglect, in the protection of the human spirit against corruption.
Without courage, no other quality can be put into play. We have shipped our courage off to suffer faceless conscription in the foreign puzzle of Iraq, and at home we wring our hands or hide behind the glowing phosphor of the lie machine.
I have seen some courage today among survivors in New Orleans. It is on the other side of the mountain. It isn't mine, and I don't feel satisfied at all.
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