What's Going on in the Rockaways and NYC

On Friday, Mara (who is far more active than I in nonprofits and volunteer works) pointed me towards Astoria Recovers, which was organizing volunteers to go down to the Rockaways and help out down there.  I’d tried signing up with other organizations, which hadn’t gotten back to me, so we went with this one.  The recovers people are part of a greater, more spread out movement called Occupy Sandy (if you’re not in the Northeast you can donate to them here.  There was hardly any FEMA, LIPA or NYC sanitation presence in the Rockaways.  While, as I do believe, these companies are doing a modestly okay job with the resources they have, the Occupy people have been far more proactive in getting resources to the people who have been devastated by the storm. I also talked to a very friendly and generous group of Sikhs from a coalition of Queens gurdwaras who practically forced a plate of (very tasty) hot food on us.  Churches were also out in full force as well; there were many generous groups offering food and help.

Speaking as someone who has never been in a disaster area before, it’s hard to imagine until you’re actually there.  We saw all of these images from Katrina, and perhaps being inundated with images like that from the likes of Roland Emmerich and Michael Bay our whole lives, the seriousness of the actual situation perhaps loses saliency when you see those images on the television and online, and not in real life.  I think that was the case for me; one hears about the tragedy in New Orleans, or in Haiti a couple of years ago, or in Japan last year, the list goes on, but there’s a lack of subjectivity when you see it on a screen; images of disasters that look familiar, as we’ve seen similar in movies.

Read More →