tony pierce.com + mary!
busblog at gmail dot com

nothing in here is true

 


   Monday, September 05, 2005  
when theyre not drinking, listening to npr, or reading all those confounded books, my pals sk smith and dan are... whats this... volunteering?!?!

apparently busloads of evacuees from the gulf coast made it to Austin on Saturday night and sk and her man were not only nice enough to be there but good enough to write a few paragraphs about it

yes it was just a little thing, but every little bit counts. im sure that there are thousands of little stories like this, if not tens of thousands, but heres one.

a portion:
On Saturday night Dan and I were watching a horrible rerun of Saturday Night Live and mostly falling asleep on the couch when an emergency message scrawled across the bottom of the television screen. A hundred volunteers were urgently needed at the Convention Center downtown—evacuees were coming in by the busload and a large number were expected around 5am, and the Red Cross needed people to set up cots. I mentioned this to Dan, who wasn’t really paying attention, in the hopes that he would let us both off the hook by saying “Enh, let’s just go tomorrow.” But no, he is a Boy Scout, and so we put on our shoes and hoofed it down to the Convention Center.

When we got there, the line at the volunteer sign-in was maybe 10 people deep. By the time we were signed in, the line stretched all the way outside, and the Statesman later reported that over 400 people showed up. As a Red Cross coordinator led away my little group of volunteers, we walked past this incredible line, and it was a lovely thing indeed to see that the only thing these people had in common was that they were all homebodies who’d been spending their Saturday night watching television. Collegiate Asian hipsters, middle-aged Hispanic women, young black couples…I was relieved to see it wasn’t just a bunch of bleeding-heart KLRU subscribers ministering to the poor and disenfranchised.
as the good professor says, read the whole thing

buzznet and the mississip sun-hearld have teamed up + blog of the year + destroying FEMA


Previously on busblog...