doit, doit now!

I keep finding myself near tears when watching the news reports of these poor people in New Orleans. This is really unthinkable. The tragedy keeps reminding me of living as close as I did to the Twin Towers (below Houston Street!) when they fell and how overwhelming and confusing and heartbreaking it was. My heart really goes out to these people — I can’t imagine what it might be like to actually be down there right now.

It also reminds me that California, much like New Orleans, quite literally exists because of the levees controlling the Sacramento River Delta. If a quake on the Hayward fault was to rupture those levees it would essentially poison the state’s water supply with saltwater and could quite possibly lead to the evacuation of the entire state south of Bay Area, which is to say nothing of the devastation that would occur in the Bay Area itself. (A quake on the San Andreas would work too, but the quake would have to be much larger in order to affect the Delta). Don’t believe me? It happened last year in June to only one levee, causing 270 people to be evacuated and state water officials to go crazy trying to prevent water contamination. It also happened just by itself with no natural disasters to prod it. An earthquake with enough force would take out far more than one levee and spill into the Central Valley Project, which would ruin farmland and leave LA and San Diego with only the relative trickle of water that they get from the Colorado River. Marc Reisner’s A Dangerous Place talks about this risk in great detail if you want more info.

Some people might be complaining about people living in areas that are disaster prone and spewing bullshit about our tax dollars being used to subsidize people who “chose to live in the area.” First off, I would much rather have my tax dollars subsidizing people in the United States in genuine need than in some foreign war that we were lied to about and that has only made us as a country less safe and killed tens of thousands of innocent people in the process. Second off, there is no place in the US that is immune to natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and other ilk. Not. One. Place. This sort of tragedy is precisely why I think we have a federal government and exactly where I think tax dollars should be going. These people are in desperate need of help.

I am not only happy to have my tax dollars going to that assistance rather than the evil war our disgusting leaders have us in, I am happy to give even more than my tax dollars voluntarily. I even looked into volunteering down on the Gulf but most agencies are requiring a minimum of a week stay and my clients would quite literally kill me if I did that at the moment. In the mean time, donating is the best thing for anyone to do. The Red Cross is the most logical place, and is where I donated. You can donate anything now, even $5, on your credit card or debit card. Don’t think about it. Just click that link and do it. You can afford something. There will come a time when you need other people to do the same, either for you or for someone you love.

Doit. Doit now.