Self Deleted

[countryjake]

236. Are you perhaps failing to realize what "utter devastation" means?

I'm not saying that you aren't, but it just seems to me that a pretty big chunk of NYC is a disaster area...there are thousands upon thousands of families experiencing the exact same shock and grief that those Staten Island people are crying about.

I've been watching the news reports all week of the horror those who stayed in place on Staten suffered thru, starting with the videos of the NYPD helicopters plucking many of them off of their roofs early on Tuesday morning...I haven't a doubt those residents have been traumatized, but I also think that sort of trauma results in much of the emotional frenzy that has been shown today on so many of the news channels. They're experiencing a very natural and deep desire to simply "go home", a desperate need for the comfort of the familiar, which most likely will be impossible for them, as it is with almost every disaster in which homes have been lost. Surviving and managing to stay calm when living in a disaster-sheltered environment, depending on emergency relief, is really hard on anyone (just look at the tent cities down in Haiti), but unfortunately, that is the hard truth of utter devastation.

I do know that there are several other areas which were under mandatory evacuation where the residents have only just today been allowed to return, to see for themselves whether or not there was anything left to return to; all of the many dangers that still lurk in that destruction, as first responders systematically clear a region, have been too real.

Registering with the Red Cross and then filling out FEMA applications should be their number one priority (and I know that both are already on Staten Island as I also watched a video on Tuesday where the Red Cross had a table registering south beach folk at one of the shelters). Somehow, I don't see how President Obama holding a clipboard, taking those applications, is going to help matters much. There are tons of volunteers packing up FEMA boxes, probably even as I type this, and frankly, I don't need to see any photo-ops of soup-ladling candidates, taking advantage of hungry folk stuck in a disaster shelter.

Also, if those people know what's good for them, they shouldn't be in such a hurry to have the authorities come around to inspect their damage, only to slap a big "Condemned" notification on their front doors...rather, they might find what comfort they can from their remaining neighbors and surrounding community, because anywhere there is "utter devastation" that also usually means the end of such close community and that is the saddest destruction of all.