Dear Alison,
Please would you unsubscribe me from the mailing list on this e-mail and resubcribe me on [log in to unmask]
This e-mail can't take the number of posts that are sent every day, so I have set up a special account just for the mailing list.
Thanks,
Zoe Brigley
>>> [log in to unmask] 09/02/05 01:10 AM >>>
I've been following Hurricane Katrina obsessively, through blogs and news
reports, since it was approaching New Orleans. I'm not quite sure why,
apart from the appalled sense of what was about to happen/what was
happening. Perhaps partly out of a sense that this is our future - extreme
weather events are going to be part of the pattern of all our lives from now
on. As my father said when an unusually severe storm hit Williamstown last
year, "get used to it".
But also the irony: there was an amazing photo of the Hyatt Hotel, with all
its windows blown out, behind the tattered remnants of an American flag:
total devastation of the kind that we have been told, over and over, will
come from the "evil ideologies" of those like Al Qaeda. But when that
devastation struck, it was a "natural disaster". Even, maybe, an "act of
God". Of course, the reason the levees weren't built up as they should be,
why there wasn't an effective plan to get those with transport out of the
city and so on, is because requested funding was diverted to the Iraq War
and homeland security. The present level of misery and worse could have been
prevented with better planning, but the administration's eye is elsewhere,
on phantoms, on arguing against the actuality of global warming, and so on.
I'll be very interested to see what happens after this particular
catastrophe.
Best
A
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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