What I'm Really Learning From College

There is probably nothing more paradoxically exciting and terrifying then your last year of college. I often get up in the morning and look in the mirror and half expect a deer in headlights to be looking back at me. All this fun, these good times, great friends, and 'best years of your life;' it's almost like I can feel them escaping like sand through my fingers.

So how did my last year at The Ohio State University start out? Good question, my time-wasting companion. It began with my computer taking a snap, crackle, pop and dying on me. That's probably why you haven't seen an update here in awhile. So yeah, that was bad.

In the plus column, however, it looks like I am now an Entertainment writer for U Weekly. When I have a story published, I'll be sure to put a copy of it here too, for you people that are in to that sort of thing. It's kind of funny, for the longest time I wanted to be a journalist (and still do), but it's not a top priority for me anymore. As soon as it wasn't a priority and I didn't cafe, I land a job at a news radio station, become director of music programming at the tv station, and now a writer for a newspaper / magazine. If you don't believe there is irony in this world, you're a moron.

And what would a new year be without new beginnings? Most of our idiot neighbors have fled our turf, and a few cool ones seemed to have moved in - always a plus in CW's book.

Finally, at the beginning of every school year, I try to make a resolution, you know, like at the real New Year's, and not this fake one at the end of September. Last year at this time it was quit my job at Micro Center and find out what was really important to me in life. Gain some perspective, figure out what I would do when I left college (and while I was still in it) to maybe make the world a little better than when I found it. Well, I don't think I'm all the way there yet on that one, but I'm still working on it, and think I'm going to be OK in the karma department. So this year's resolution?

Learn to play the drums.

I encourage the rest of you to make your own 'fake New Year's' resolution. It doesn't have to be anything great or profound, hell, you don't even have to actually accomplish it. The purpose should be the journey it takes you on, not necessarily the destination.

As for me, the set will be in the living room by October 2nd. Come by for a concert later this year.

People seem to keep reading my thoughts and news snippets on Katrina, so I might as well write a little more. However, after this one, I'll go back to something fun - no one likes to focus on tragedy forever. I'm sure this weekend's Ohio State vs. Texas game will provide enough hilarity for awhile anyway.

Last time I lightly touched on how high the death toll from all this may be. Last December, the government finished a preliminary report about what would happen if a massive hurricane hit New Orleans. What would you guess the death toll from that might be?

The simulation done by FEMA predicted 61,290 deaths from such a hurricane.

That would be 9/11 times about 20. I don't expect the casualties to be this high, but a hard number like this helps some people grasp the magnitude of the disaster.

In following up with my personal distaste with President Bush, a new poll was released today. His job approval rating has sunk to 39 percent, a new low. Will the aftermath of this hurricane be the straw that breaks the collective back of Americans thoughts on our president? Time will tell...

I hate to be so negative though, so here is a story, again, you may not have heard about, at least yet, because it just came across the AP wire a little bit ago. Here is the text in full, straight off the wire -

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (AP) - Al Gore helped airlift some 270 Katrina evacuees on two private charters from New Orleans earlier this week. Gore was acting at the urging of a doctor who saved the life of the former vice president's son. Doctor David Kline operated on Gore's son, Albert, after a life-threatening auto accident in 1989. He was trying to get in touch with Gore. Kline was stranded with patients at Charity Hospital in New Orleans. Gore criticized the Bush administration's slow response to Katrina in a speech in San Francisco today, but refused to be interviewed about the mercy missions he financed and flew. An account of the flights was posted this week on a Democratic Party Web page.

People think I'm a hardcore Democrat (not true), but I never really cared for Al Gore. The only thing I ever remotely liked about Al Gore was Darrell Hamond's impression of him on SNL. However, this news story puts an incredible smile on my face. Someone with the money and means to help out during a tragedy, not waiting around for bureaucracy to take of the situation - and the guy who did it just happened to be Al Gore. I'm also pleased that he chose not to talk about it to the press, because then the whole thing comes off as more of a political stunt and takes a lot of the "warm and fuzzy" factor out of the whole thing.

There are similar stories of everyday people rising up during this time. Doctors, children, teenagers, and many other ordinary folks. Anderson Cooper on CNN has been covering many of these stories on his show during the last few days if this interests you. CNN is also highlighting many of these stories of triumph on it's website.

Finally, I am going to lay off posting about this incident for awhile. It is each individual's responsibility to see what is going on, and form their own opinion about it. I'm sure I will revisit this subject down the road, but for now, I will lay off and let you gather and respond to what is going on in your own way. The reports and stories I have mentioned were taken from the following sources:

• www.boingboing.net
• today.reuters.com
• www.npr.org
• www.bbc.co.uk
• CNN's website and show Anderson Cooper 360
• Jacob Appelbaum's weblog (he is in New Orleans documenting the area)
• Jacob's photos
  

I encourage you to get your ordinary news from a place like the BBC. They do an excellent job of reporting, and it is refreshing to read the news without an American slant.

And with that, I have about 3 minutes until my shift here at work is over, so I will bid you ado.

Go Bucks!!!

09/09/05 - 1.53am - Added comments at end of article -CW.

Are you aware that we have well over 30,000 refugees in our own country right now? Let that number sink in for a second. 30,000 people - without jobs or a place to call home, many of them carrying their important earthly possessions in a trash bag. Not in Israel, not in Iraq or Bosnia, here in the United States of America, over 30,000 people who have left their homes behind and fled to safety.

The amount of those who perished could certainly be over that of the 9/11 tragedies, which will not be known for some time.

What is known is there are 25,000 body bags at the ready, a makeshift morgue that can hold 5,000, and another morgue at the intersection of I-10 and I-610.

I mentioned before that our president, George W. Bush, cut his vacation short due to Hurricane Katrina. However, I forgot to mention what he was doing:






The buck does not appear to stop here.

Remember that guy on NBC's Meet the Press from my last post? Yesterday, 30 other dead bodies were pulled from a nursing home in the same parish, maybe you heard about it on the news.

Here is a story you didn't see on the news. There is a group at the Houston Astrodome who has been working to set up an emergency radio station that would air information on lost persons, government/job/supply assistance, etc. for those inside the dome. They have been granted licenses by the FCC to do this very thing, but FEMA officials at the dome have blocked them several times. First, they were told by FEMA they would need 10,000 radios to warrant their broadcasting in the dome. The radios were promptly donated and they were again blocked by FEMA, this time saying that they could not use the Astrodome's electricity to power the station. The station promptly offered to run it all on their own generators and fuel. They were again denied, and not given a reason. Bureaucracy, censorship, one hand not knowing what the other is doing - draw your own opinions and conclusions.

The police officers in New Orleans who had been under siege from looters following the Hurricane? 500 officers are unaccounted for, 200 have quit, many are being treated for trauma, and two have committed suicide. Even these men, for whom putting their life on the line is part of their job description, are cracking under the pressure.

There are more stories out there like these, sadly. In the meantime, everyone is looking for someone to blame - the president and FEMA seem to be taking most of the heat, though neither are totally culpable or totally blameless. (Keith Olbermann's scathing commentary is by far my personal favorite, I highly suggest taking 5 minutes to watch it).

What is the point of me blabbering on about all this shit I doubt many of you will really grasp or care about for more than a short while? I can boil it down to something Virginia Woolf once wrote:

On the outskirts of every agony is some observant fellow who points.

While this quote wasn't meant to be supportive, I interpret it as such. It is important for the public to know as much about tragedies as it can, the pain, the causes, and what is being done to correct it, so that we may me able to prevent similar agony in the future. If we stop pointing, and acknowledging tragedy, over time we may stop caring.

And if we stop caring - God help us all.

Edit: Some comments from friends the day I posted this.

A friend in Texas -

i just read your blogs about katrina
and im surrounded by these ppl, i live oh i dont two minutes from reliant stadium
and i still cant even comprehend it
even though i see all these ppl in my city wandering around aimlessly
with nothing


In Cambridge -

i love your blogs.... not the story well b.c it is sad but the way you write it is so good. i dont get the news so i love that i can read your blog and it pretty much keeps me up to date on shit! thanks... and i do care about what is going on so if you come up with more stuff write about it so that i can read it! thanks corey!


In New Concord -

i just read the blogs that you've written in regards to Hurricane Katrina.... very well said... it's horrible to think that our country has fallen apart in an emergency situation, partly because we're too wrapped up in what's going on overseas to take care of our own country.... i respect your opinion and always enjoy reading your blogs

A few others have had similiar things to say. I hope that more Americans in general get talking about the important things happening in their backyard.

If you have other comments of your own you would like to leave, there is a button to do it below.

Not everything I post here can be funny. If you can't handle that, dont read this one.

Note: I began to write this post on Sunday evening, but had to abandon it because my shift at work was up.... sadly, this situation is, and will continue, to get worse.

For most of last weekend I have been in a funk because of Hurricane Katrina. Partially because of the horrible tragedy that is taking place in the Gulf States, but also (the journalism side of me) because I doubt very much that most Americans my age (or Americans in general) have an accurate idea of what is going on down there.

For those of you who don't know, on the weekends I work at NPR. Sunday morning and afternoon I had to sit idly by while reports of tragedy and horror poured into the station from the AP and NPR in Washington D.C.

Several news reports centered around the National Guard, and how they were just arriving to the disaster zone to assist the Coast Guard's efforts. Mind you, this is six days after Katrina hit, is the National Guard sent in. Anyway, many of the reports were coming in that they had just that afternoon, started evacuating people trapped on rooftops. My God, I thought, these people can not have possibly been neglected for almost a week. The longer the day went on, however, I found out this was painfully true.

On the Sunday NBC show, Meet the Press, Tim Russert had a guest on who worked in New Orleans; he recounted a heart wrenching tale. Below is the text from the Reuters story about it.

"The guy who runs this building I'm in, the emergency management, who's responsible for everything. His mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home and every day she called him and said are you coming, son, is somebody coming," Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, said as he burst into heavy sobbing on NBC's Meet the Press program.

"And he said 'yeah mama, somebody's coming to get ya, somebody's coming to get ya on Tuesday, somebody's coming to get ya on Wednesday, somebody's coming to get ya on Thursday, somebody's coming to get you on Friday.'

"And she drowned Friday night, she drowned Friday night. Nobody's coming to get us."
"Nobody's coming to get us, nobody's coming to get us," Broussard said through tears.

Here is a link to the video.

Throughout the rest of the day there were several more reports from those left behind in New Orleans, many were similarly gut-wrenching. Not among them were the reports of our President being on vacation when New Orleans was left to fend for itself and then, ever graciously, cutting his vacation 24 hours short.

Dr. Condoleezza Rice, National Security Advisor? After the hurricane hit, she was at a Broadway production of Spamalot, a Monty Python musical. After she received some fallout from this, Ms. Rice released statement supporting the current administration's handling of the situation.

It is early Tuesday (September 6th) as I write this. Think the situation is getting better? Here is what the president's mother (while touring the area with her son) had to say:

And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this--this (she chuckles slightly) is working very well for them."

While the governmental response bothers me, something else bothers me more. The numerous reports of rapes, murders, and beatings, etc. coming out of New Orleans: Is this the true nature of mankind. When it all comes down to it, is this what we are reduced to? Are we really by nature these terrible animals that steal, rape, and kill when given the 'right' circumstance?

Only one local news story has made me seriously think otherwise, that man may just be good at heart with evil tendencies, and not the other way around. It is a report of the first bus to arrive at the Houston Astrodome. The full story is here (video here). If you don't want to take the tie to read/watch it, here's the gist. An 18 year old kid in New Orleans came across an abandoned school bus. Having never driven a bus before, he took it, and drove around New Orleans, collecting passengers until the bus was packed to the max. He drove seven hours straight to the Houston Astrodome, where refugees were being transported. He also beat the chartered busses that had been scheduled for much longer to take refugees from New Orleans there.

Law enforcement officials are talking about arresting this kid for taking the bus; pardon my opinion, but I think he should get a god damn medal.

If you watch CNN, I'm sure you have heard of many more stories as equally infuriating, saddening, and uplifting as these.

I do not pretend to be an expert on disaster relief - I am only a college senior who will probably join the Corps when he graduates. I am neither, by any means a religious man. However, if you gave a little prayer and a little extra cash for the Gulf, I know it certainly won't hurt anything. The monetary equivalent of at least a burrito or beer at your favorite restaraunt/bar isn't going to bankrupt you. You can donate here or at the Red Cross's site. You can also bring your spare change to collection bins at Wal*Mart.