Katrina

Sunday, August 28, 2005

Please oh please oh please oh please let Hurricane Katrina miss New Orleans. Well, unless that means it would hit just to the west of the city, because that sounds like it would be even worse. Or is it the east? I’ve heard both. Hell, it’s probably all bad.

As for the person who visited here a little while ago with an IP that appeared to be from near the Big Easy, I’m flattered by your visit, but please… get the hell out of Dodge. I pray for your safety and for that of the rest of the people of New Orleans.

:: :: :: ::

Update: (2am PDT) I’ve been listening to coverage from the CBS affiliate in Baton Rouge, and maybe, just maybe, it looks like things are weakening slightly (it’s down to Category 4, at least) and flattening out a bit. It still looks like it’s going to be terribly destructive. But any glimmer of hope is good, I guess.

I hope this isn’t as necessary as it looks like it will be:
American Red Cross
Catholic Charities USA

Also, to the folks at ABC who continue to run promos on ESPN and elsewhere in the ABC family for that ”Invasion” show in September… You know, the promos that begin with the ominous voiceover: “In the aftermath of a hurricane...” Yeah. Maybe you should shelve those for a little bit. Just sayin’.

I’m going to say a few more prayers and try to get some sleep.

:: :: :: ::

Update: (9am PDT) Whew. Obviously, she’s still an awfully dangerous and destructive storm, and even New Orleans isn’t out of harm’s way yet, but it looks like Katrina shifted enough to the east that the worst was avoided. Thank God.

3 Ripples Tags
disasters | hurricane katrina | weather

All Booked Up

Sunday, August 28, 2005

It’s been a while since I got in on a little meme action. But it seems I done been tagged by Nicole. For those of you who have been following my book list, a few of these answers will come as no surprise.

1. Number of books you have owned:

Well, between the two of us, we’re at somewhere over 600 at the moment. But have owned? That’s an awfully tricky one. I tend to buy more bookcases before getting rid of books. Then again, we donated a few boxes to the Friends of the Berkeley Public Library a year or two ago. And then there were all those books I sold back in college. So, I don’t know… Let’s just call it an even 1,000 give or take a few hundred and move on.

2. Last book(s) I bought:

The Big Over Easy by Jasper Fforde — Fforde’s ffirst book after his delightful Thursday Next series. I’m having a difficult time getting into this one. It’s still fun and still has all the signs of a Fforde book, but I haven’t yet invested myself into his new set of characters. Maybe that will change by the end. I hope so.

The Prophetic Imagination by Walter Brueggemann — I have a fairly tall pile of books that I want to read next. But this has been spoken of with such reverence by so many people I’m in the habit of reading that I might need to put it near the top of the pile.

3. Last book I completed:

Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation by Miroslav Volf — I just completed it this weekend, and the final chapter is the most challenging, so I’m still processing it. There is quite a bit in this book that I found compelling, and you should expect Volf to start showing up in future posts. But he also ends with a picture of God that disturbs me for reasons that I’m still thinking through.

4. Five books that mean a lot to me:

This isn’t a complete list. Rather, it’s a quick list of books that I adore. Were I to attempt to summarize why I love each of them, this post would take me a few more hours. So I won’t. And I’m not stopping at five, either. So there.

  • The Brothers K by David James Duncan
  • A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
  • Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
  • Gilead by Marylinne Robinson
  • The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • The Jesus I Never Knew by Philip Yancey
  • Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott
  • Bloom County Babylon: Five Years of Basic Naughtiness by Berkeley Breathed
  • Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
  • The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor
  • and whatever other books make me wake up in the middle of the night and kick myself for forgetting....

4b. What are you currently reading?

The Big Over Easy by Jasper Fforde — (see above)

The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard — I haven’t picked this up in a while, not because it isn’t excellent, but because I got distracted by other things.

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri — A Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of short stories. I’ve been reading this slowly and savoring each story. It’s lovely.

5. Which 5 bloggers are you passing this onto?

Hmmm… For some reason, I feel weird about tagging people. Some folks just plain don’t seem to go for the memes. Many of the folks I would ordinarily go to have already been tagged, especially since Nicole gave Kevin a head start. Other folks have already done this a while ago, I think.

So if you comment here or if you’re linked on my sidebar and you feel like doing this but haven’t been tagged, have at it.

13 Ripples Tags
books | memes

Darfur: Action is Character

Sunday, August 28, 2005

Blue Girl, Red State (via Kevin Drum) tells the story of a friend who just came back from serving Sudanese refugees in Chad:

What she dealt with daily goes beyond the pale...beyond the nightmares of most people; Children with all four limbs hacked off right above the knee or below the elbow. Twelve year olds who died in childbirth after being gang-raped by the Janjaweed. Women who gave birth to rape-babies who were then cast out by their families for shaming the family name, leaving only one avenue of survival for themselves and their children after the camps: Prostitution.

What is fucking her up is the desperation, and the fact that she worked herself to death for over a month, and she still didn’t really save anyone. Now that she’s gone, it’s like she was never there. Even the ones she helped keep alive, she didn’t save. You try dealing with that reality.

And women are the preponderance of victims. Men do not leave the villages to go to the countryside to gather firewood and other necessary items of sustenance. Women venture out, even though every time they leave their villages, they are at horrific risk of being beaten and raped and disfigured. The reason they go instead of the men? The women are only attacked, the men are killed.

One thousand or so international aid workers are in Sudan and Chad. Those in Sudan are increasingly targeted by militias. Even those not targeted battle emotional exhaustion like the woman described above. They need our prayers, their organizations need our financial support, the American television media need to at least pretend like they care, and NATO needs to think about sending peacekeeping forces.

For starters.

Blue Girl, Red State finishes her post with this:

If you want to do something to show your support, give a few bucks to Darfur action by Amnesty International, or to Doctors Without Borders, or to the Quakers medical missions. Or the Red Cross, for cryin’ out loud! If you do, leave a post and we’ll let her know about your action.

And if you can’t donate money, that’s no hinderance to contributing to the common good. Just look around you and see something that needs to be done; be it picking up a candy wrapper in a parking lot or carrying an old ladies purchases to her car. And then step up and do it.

Update: 60 Minutes will be doing a segment about Darfur on Sunday night.

Make a Ripple Tags
africa | darfur | genocide | poverty | sudan
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