DISQUS

Audi · 2 years ago

yes, i know that you wrote this months and months ago, but i just wanted to say that it's a fantastic idea, people being prepared on their own. i hope you learned a lot, because i went back home for mardi gras just a month before you wrote this, and we went to the ninth ward. and you know what? it's still totally fucked. i stood a block away from the levee that burst. i don't know what i expected, but all i could do was sit in my car and cry, cry harder than i had in a very long time. and anything that people can do to help themselves is fantastic, because no one else cares. that's what i learned from the whole thing. i mean, people care. but groups, groups just get too bogged down in STUFF.
not a terribly cheerful thought, but it's the truth. it was harder to see from so far away, i'm sure, but if you could go back and see what i see, almost two years after it happened, and see how different it all is.....it still isn't right. anything you can do to get people to wake up and learn to take care of themselves, that's not part of your crazy. that's lucid. don't let the ninth ward (or river ridge, or lakeview, or plaquemines parish, or st. bernard parish, or pass christian, or any of the other places that got destroyed just as badly as the ninth ward) happen again. in new orleans or anywhere else.
i'm done.

puckish · 2 years ago

yeah. i can't even think or talk about new orleans, *still* because it still breaks my heart. and it wasn't mine, that city. i had distant ties full of love, but it wasn't nearly as much mine as it was so many other folks'.

i didn't end up finishing the course, but i'm going to do my best to take it up again when i get back to san francisco.