contributions

There are so many words that come to mind. As a scholar I am thinking Diaspora, social displacement, systemic disruption, mass trauma, pandemic and unbelievable chaos. As a clinician, I am looking at something that we have never been trained to handle in this country — a level of victimization and its resultant psycho-social ripples that mandate a whole new field of clinical practice-mass victimology. Katrina kicked the top off of a racist and social termite’s nest that has been growing (…)

Food Not Bombs volunteers from Prescott and Tucson serve their first meals to a group of FEMA-contracted truckers and refugees at the Baton Rouge convention center.
After receiving word that over 100 truckers were sitting in a Target parking lot in east Baton Rouge, the AZ Food Not Bombs mobile kitchen showed up with several pots of beans, chili and rice.
We spent a couple hours talking with the semi drivers, who were operating under FEMA to bring water and food into New Orleans - but, (…)

Miriam Raftery
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has hired Kenyon International to set up a mobile morgue for handling bodies in Baton Rouge, Louisiana following Hurricane Katrina, RAW STORY has learned.
Kenyon is a subsidiary of Service Corporation International (SCI), a scandal-ridden Texas-based company operated by a friend of the Bush family. Recently, SCI subsidiaries have been implicated in illegally discarding and desecrating corpses.
Louisiana governor Katherine Blanco (…)

New Orleans — A long caravan of white vans led by an Army humvee rolled Monday through New Orleans’ Bywater district, a poor, mostly black neighborhood, northeast of the French Quarter.
Recovery team members wearing white protective suits and black boots stopped at houses with spray painted markings on the doors designating there were dead bodies inside.
Outside one house on Kentucky Street, a member of the Army 82nd Airborne Division summoned a reporter and photographer standing nearby (…)

Michael P. Wright — Norman, Oklahoma USA mpwright9@aol.com
Most Americans probably do not know the origins of the phrase Bella Ciao. This was the anthem of the World War II anti-fascist Italian underground. They called themselves partigiani (partisans). I assume that the words were written from the point of view of a resistance fighter saying good-bye to his lover.
Here are the Italian lyrics and translation to English. Italians are invited to offer corrections if I have made any (…)

HATRED OR UNDYING LOVE?
By Peter Fredson
September 13, 2005
I spend much time reviewing my computer files, which now occupy about 5 gigabytes of space, to see how things started and to try and prognosticate how they might end. While looking at the Bill Clinton years I am impressed at the hatred expressed against him by Republicans, certainly tantamount to their hatred toward Franklyn Delano Roosevelt. Intense, bitter, vicious, nasty, seething and immensely personal. All the Bush (…)

OSLO, NORWAY — Norway was poised for a power shift after the left-leaning opposition won a majority of seats in parliament with pledges to spend more of the nation’s oil wealth on welfare, official election results showed early today.
With more than 96 percent of votes counted, a three-party coalition led by the Labor Party had won 88 seats in the 169-seat assembly, enough to oust the center-right government.
Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik, 58, a Christian Democrat who campaigned on (…)

We’ve all loved New Orleans, and the Big Easy has loved us right back. We’ve partied there, gambled perhaps, gorged on the delicacies and had a good time to the point of embarrassing ourselves. Losing yourself in the revelry was par for the course in this uniquely American city, a town where anything goes and all is forgiven.
Today New Orleans represents a national disgrace that is unforgivable. The devastating loss of life and human dignity in the Gulf Coast region must forever live in (…)

9-11 Liberty Rings I arrived at midnight, NYC, sight of the Twin Tower terrorist attack. It was the fourth anniversary of the towers fall and Bin Laden’s freedom from capture. NH to NY was a driving challenge, daunting navigation and distracting sights flooding this driver from the granite state. It was dark and when it became necessary to ask directions, I was a stones throw away. My mission was to paint the energy of the Towers location and anniversary, to channel my concern about (…)

Do You Know What It Means to Lose New Orleans? By ANNE RICE La Jolla, Calif.
WHAT do people really know about New Orleans?
Do they take away with them an awareness that it has always been not only a great white metropolis but also a great black city, a city where African-Americans have come together again and again to form the strongest African-American culture in the land?
The first literary magazine ever published in Louisiana was the work of black men, French-speaking poets and (…)