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?
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