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September 05, 2005
hurricanes
i went to class thursday with an agenda, but i couldn't not talk about the hurricane. i made it rhetorical, political, relevant to issues of american racism & reporting &... while that wasn't specifically on-topic either, i managed to connect it to what we were reading in our rhetoric book, to the dangers of generalization & creating--and stopping at--binaries as ways of understanding the world. looters vs. finders. as if there are only two kinds of people, black criminals & white survivors, in all of new orleans.
this is supposed to be a class whose first project is focused on education, because that's something they know, something they've always done, something they have longstanding practice at critiquing. it's not supposed to be a class about racism & ineffective disaster relief & presedential indifference, hype, empty promises & war-metaphors, but i can't promise right now that that won't happen.
it's hard to pay attention to anything else for long. it's hard to read the news & think anything else is significant. it's hard to read other people's blogs & see how everybody made that first push of focus & then moved on to other things. i know we're too far away to do much, once we've made our donations. i know there aren't any refugees in our dome--there can't be, after all, there was a game on saturday--to take in or help out. i know the human brain has a limited capacity for tragedy, especially when it has the option to turn it off, which tens of thousands of people down south don't right now but we do. i don't know how the hell so many people can write & talk & think & care about football.
Posted by ttobryan at September 5, 2005 06:53 AM