Rock rock rockaway beach
with our favorite song by the Ramones in mind, we’re teaming up with our friends at habitat for humanity to help with repairs in a community where so many homes were hit hard by hurricane sandy. this is going down this saturday, april 13th. if you want to help out, here’s your chance:
we’re looking for 20 people to join us at rockaway beach in ny and lend a hand starting at 8:15am. if you live in the area, are 18+, and want to have fun helping people in need, submit the following info: full name, birthday (month, day year), current city you live in to fobrockaway@gmail.com. If you’re not 18+, please do not email in. If chosen, you will be notified tomorrow by 12pm EST and you will need to show i.d. on Saturday morning.
oh and the one and only Marky Ramone will be stopping by to serve his world famous pasta sauce for lunch…and who knows, maybe we’ll have a “rockaway beach” singalong when we’re out there.
we’re hitching a ride to rockaway beach.
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.
