Category: Connecting

I haven’t had much to say the last couple of days. When I read this I was concerned that anything I would say at this point would probably result in a visit from the Secret Service.

I did want to point out a couple of things. The first a letter containing questions and a request for a hearing penned by the Government Reform Minority Office. Add to this letter the new items we’re hearing, such as FEMA sending evacuees to the wrong state, and Brown induging in polite chit-chat when a catastrophe looms.

Norm Jenson has three good videos worth a first, second, and third look. The first is an interview with Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard. If you haven’t seen this yet, be prepared — it is not something that will leave you unmoved. You may want to watch it when you get home.

The second is an editorial by Keith Olbermann, and all I can say is that I am so glad there is someone like Olbermann who can do such a brilliant job of artculating our anger.

The third is of Jon Stewart. What Stewart provides is a way of laughing ourselves out of the immobility of the grief and the anger so that we can act. Right now, we’re acting in support of the victims of Katrina. Later, we’ll be acting against those who shirked their duty, completely gutted what was once the most efficient organization in the US government, and who dismissed an entire group of people just because the people are poor, and black, and southern.

Even now, Bush brings up WMD first, when he talks about making sure we’re prepared. WMD, then natural disasters. WMD first, because God causes natural disasters, so it’s up to God to repair the damages. Let the religious organizations deal with it. The religious organizations and the states and the counties and the cities. That way, the federal government can spend more money in Iraq.

Here’s a tidbit for you: the damage in New Orleans has cost thousands of lives, including several hundred waiting to be rescued from a ferry warehouse, and the 30 old people drowned when they were left unprotected in their beds. It will most likely cost 150billion dollars to fix, could result in devestating cultural and community shifts within one of our most important cultural and transportation cities, will pollute the surrounding area for years to come–and could have been prevented if 3 billion dollars had been set aside to fix the levees to withstand a category 5 hurricane.

Not only did we not spend this money, we removed all funding to provide any upkeep of the levee this last year — a year that scientists have said would be the worst hurricane season in history.

But more on that at a later time. Right now, I’m too unbalanced to be very articulate. Instead, I’ll point you to a writing by Dave Rogers called Change. It is by far the best work he has ever done, and one of the best writings I’ve read this year. I want to quote the whole, but will try to settle for a smaller piece:

There is something that keeps a group of people together that is more than just a paycheck. We “honor” individuals within our group as a way of renewing and strengthening that thing that keeps us together. It’s about faith, which is a word that is much abused of late. It’s about keeping faith with one another, and the really important things we believe, even if we don’t think about them much. To honor someone is to keep faith with them. Honor, the noun, is the quality of having kept faith with one’s fellows.
…
What happened in the failures of government in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was not something intrinsic to the nature of bureaucracies or the public sector. What happened was a failure of leadership, a failure to renew and strengthen the shared faith that makes each of us a part of something larger, and hopefully, better than we are as individuals. What happened was a failure of leadership to keep faith with us.

That failure in leadership was not an accident. It was the result of too many years of too much neglect of the value of public service. For too many years, for too many people, public service has become just a means of advancing oneself in the private sector. People with something to gain, people with a profit motive, selfish, cynical people, have blurred the ideas of authority, responsibility, and accountability. All toward the end of abusing their authority to promote themselves while neglecting or ignoring their responsibilities, oblivious to the shared faith that has become the tattered and fraying social fabric that binds us together.

That failure in leadership was not an accident. It was the product of a political system that has embraced the ways and the methods of the marketplace to manipulate people, to command their attention or distract it. To craft clever, meaningless messages intended to obscure more than to illuminate. To appeal to fear rather than courage. To value appearance over substance. A marketplace in which honesty and integrity are often perceived as impediments to a healthy bottom line.
…
I’ve seen a lot of folks wondering what “we” can do to address this situation, and, predictably, people are focusing on technological solutions, when what we have is not a fundamentally technological problem. It’s something far less physical. It’s a crisis of faith, it’s a kind of identity crisis about who we are as a people and what we say we believe. Because there’s a disconnect, an enormous chasm, between what we say we believe and how we manifest that belief in the leadership we choose and the other choices we make. So if you want to try to begin to “solve” this problem, I’d say your time would be better spent there than in advocating a particular technology. I will note that many of those who do will be doing so while angling for some competitive advantage in the marketplace.

There is so much more — this excerpt doesn’t do the writing justice, so, please, read the whole essay.

About the issue of focusing on a technology solution to what ‘ails’ us. This was, in part, the inspiration for the post that I created, edited, added to, and eventually deleted–leaving only a cryptic ‘never. mind’. It was inspired in part by of discussions of meetings to organize ‘disaster 2.0′ — upon reading of which left me equally enraged and despondent. I am glad, now, that I pulled my writing because Dave says what I should have said.

We can’t afford to get caught up in the anger, sadness, and the despair; the amount of work and the utter indifference of the government. If we do, we’ll never change things, and we need to bring about change. It’s not a political party change because switching the Republicans out for Democrats won’t make a difference if the Democrats bring the same marketing mindset that Dave references. (Though I strongly believe the Republicans have had their chance these last few years, and have made a right mess of it. It’s now their turn to play minority, until such time as they remember who it is they’re supposed to serve.)

It’s a change within our hearts and heads. We have to, as Dave said, learn anew about how to keep faith with each other. Marketing is talking; keeping faith is listening.

Having said that, I also listened, with thanks and relief, to Dave’s post today about the feathered dinosaur. As to my opinion of the conclusions reached, Dave, all I have to say is this:

Scary, eh?

I also noticed that Tropical Storm Ophelia is blasting the area where you live, Dave, and may strengthen into a category 1 hurricane. Luckily, there’s help.

Now, that’s scary.

Stay dry and stay well, my friend. To all of you in harms way: stay dry, and stay well.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

This morning, I briefly turned my retro frames-based theme back on, long enough to take snapshots of the web sites of the various folk who left comments on the 1997 related posts. I’ve linked these at the bottom of this post. If you want to add your site to the gallery, or if I accidentally left yours off, leave a note.

The purpose of yesterday’s demonstration of Old is New Again was to have fun, but there was a point to it, too. This week we’re seeing a significant backlash against the hype of “Web 2.0″–not because we’re sneering at all the Beautiful People; but because we’ve been through this before, and we know what’s going to follow. Frankly, we’re a little peeved that people think we’re so daft as to forget what happened just a few short years ago.

Scott Rosenberg remembers, when he responded to Tim O’Reilly’s expressions of conference about a ‘hype cycle’:

I do not know what will come of this not-so-holy union, but from the feel of things at the Hotel Argent today, it seems likely that a certain number of people will get rich, a certain amount of money will be wasted, several important new companies and technologies will emerge and some indeterminate number of investors will be fleeced. So that means it’s probably too late, John and Tim — the hype-cycle wheel is already in spin, up, up, up.

For all that Web 2.0 is supposed to be about the tech, we’re seeing little new tech, and a whole lot of spin.

Returning a moment to my little frame-based web page: Frames are rarely used anymore, as web page purists having condemned them as Evil. I haven’t forgotten when they proliferated, and how they were (and still are) abused. A quick peek at about.com demonstrates how frames can, and are abused (frames, graphics, links, writers–you name it, and about.com will abuse it).

Yet for all of their abuse, they’re a nice little bit of technology. Comparing old and new, the whole concept of AJAX is so that people can make edits and refresh content ‘in place’–without having to re-load the entire web page. Frames also enabled continuity at a site, smoothing the flow of navigation. Where the two primarily differ in concept is that AJAX is restricted to accessing data local to the page of reference. Oh, and AJAX has a press agent.

To return to technology–because for all my tut tutting, I love to putter– here’s my first Ning application. I was rather amazed to see two responses already this morning. I guess I’ll have to clean it up since company is visiting.

In a previous post, I wrote:

AKMA has been writing about St. Patrick’s Church in Long Beach, Mississippi, ministered by a friend of his, Rev. David Knight. The church is gone, but the associated school is running as a clinic. If, in addition to your giving to national charities such as Red Cross, you want to make a targeted donation, sounds like the folks in the area could use a little help: manual or monetary.

(AKMA — are there facilities for people to stay in that region, for those wanting to go down and help the Reverend and other folks? Who should we contact? )

Rev. Knight left a comment I wanted to pull out and put into a post:

Hey. I am the David Knight you speak of. I can answer your question. Anyone can contact the Episcopal Diocese of Mississippi, www.dioms.org, and they will schedule in all volunteers. It is important to go that route so we can coordinate numbers. THey can give details on housing / feeding, although some degree of self-suffieciency is important. THANK YOU SO MUCH.

If you have a block of time and a means to head south, check with the Diocese to see where you can help with cleanup and repair.

I also wanted to point out that Habitat for Humanity, an organization that helps those who normally couldn’t afford it to buy their own home, has come up with an audacious plan to help rebuild homes lost to flooding, wind, or storm surge.

The plan is called Operation Home Delivery. How it will work is that Habitat associates will be recovered, and then incorporated into the second phase. This consists of Habitat units in other cities to build components of homes, which are then packaged up and sent to the south. The southern units, including new volunteers, will then use these modules to quickly build a home — in a week or less. The third phase will be homes built on the spot.

There’s been much discussion about what will happen with New Orleans in particular. I think that we can assume not all neighborhoods will be restored. Some will most likely be deemed too dangerous to recover, and probably should not have been built on in the first place. Hopefully these will be converted into parks for all the citizens to enjoy.

Other neighborhoods will be restored, particularly those less damaged, or of historic interest. Don’t knock historic interest: this is a key element to the city, and to lose the history is to lose much of the soul of New Orleans.

However, there will be entire neighborhoods that won’t be worth restoring, but will be OKed for rebuilding that can be rebuilt using the Habitat for Humanity three phase approach. The advantage to this is that it encourages diversity–because a New Orleans of nothing but wealthy people, is not New Orleans.

Tomorrow is the fourth anniversary of the Twin Tower destruction. Of 9/11. It’s memory is marred by the anger and incriminations that reflect our political debate. In particular, we bicker and squabble over memorials: this one is not grand enough, that one too grand, and the one over there looks Islamic.

A better memorial is to save the money from the memorials and put it into building neighborhoods in the south. Name each street, park, community center after the victims. Embed their memories in life, rather than cold granite, and ostentatious glass towers.