(no subject)

Seen in feminist:

As the media coverage of the disaster in New Orleans swung into high gear, reporters started to notice the racial dynamics of Hurricane Katrina's aftermath. ... [I]t would have been extremely difficult not to notice that the dead, the dying, and the desperate on the streets of New Orleans were African-American.

Nonetheless this enlightened "noticing" by the media produced a moment of genuine inquiry as reporters and analysts started asking tough, targeted questions about why this disaster fell so hard on one side of the race line. African-Americans make up about 68 percent of the population of New Orleans, and it appears from the media coverage that they represent a considerably higher proportion than that of the survivors who were trapped inside the city, perhaps as high as 80 percent.

And yet there is another equally important and starkly apparent social dimension to the hurricane disaster that media coverage has put in front of our eyes but that has yet to be "noticed": This disaster fell hard on one side of the gender line too. Most of the survivors are women. Women with children, women on their own, elderly women in wheelchairs, women everywhere--by a proportion of what looks to be again somewhere around 75 or 80 percent.

Women make up 54 percent of the population of New Orleans, so the gender gap is even more dramatic than the race gap. The two gaps need not compete for our attention; they are linked. The majority of victims trapped in New Orleans appeared to be African-American women with their children, and no doubt the ranks of the dead also will be.

The gender gap is no surprise, or shouldn't be. Disaster is seldom gender neutral. In the 1995 Kobe, Japan, earthquake, 1.5 times more women died than men; in the 2004 Southeast Asia tsunami, death rates for women across the region averaged three to four times that of men.

from Natural disasters expose gender divides

(no subject)

bradhicks articulated very well a thought that has been brewing in the back of my mind since reading about the upswelling of support for Hurricane Katrina victims -- why can't America muster even some of this same sympathy for it's "usual" homeless people? Current estimates place the homeless population at around 1% of the US population (which actually sounds low to me), 35-40% of which are under 18.

The survivors of several consecutive winters living on the streets of America wish they were so lucky as to have lost their jobs and their homes through such a mediagenic disaster, as opposed to the usual slow-motion and/or personal ones. I swear to you that I was planning on writing about this today even before Larry Rice made the same point. ...

Larry Rice is asking the question that seems very reasonable to me. Between the three FEMA-activated shelters, we've got over 6000 extra shelter beds now. Even if we just keep the big one, in an abandoned aircraft hanger at the metro airport, that's 5000 beds. If we keep at least keep that shelter ready to reactivate on very little notice, we could open it to the local homeless once the snows start and the usual trickle of homeless people would start dying every week. We could easily save a couple of dozen lives. Aren't they worth something? Or do they have to have lost their homes on television for their lives to be worth saving? ...

Nope. Those shelters are going to be shut down and dismantled until the next time a whole city goes homeless because individual tragedies, one at a time, that don't lend themselves well to television news coverage, generate no sympathy for their victims. Sure, any one of those victims could be put on television and be mediagenic enough to get help: some Gulf War vet who somehow offended or slipped through the cracks at the SSA and the VA, some woman who lost her husband and breadwinner to crime, some family whose checking account and finally mortgage payments were eaten by uninsured major medical costs, some guy who's retrained three times for jobs that each went overseas one at a time and needs a place to stay while he retrains a fourth time, probably many others. But because they didn't all happen at once and in ways that generate really moving TV images, each person's case would have to be presented to the television audience one at a time ... and charity fatigue would set in. And we won't get a political solution because the party in power is made up in equal parts of people who blame the victims for their own poverty and of people who don't blame the poor but who don't think that any help is possible, and the party that at least occasionally cares about helping those people and believes in trying is out of power because it has been unfairly tarred in the public's mind as being opposed to Jesus.

**headdesk headdesk headdesk**

Bubonic Plague carrying mice have been missing from a New Jersey counter-terrorism lab for two weeks.

It's still one of the most potentially dangerous diseases known to humankind, but authorities want you to not panic. Reassuringly, the article says, "Among other things, the rodents may have been stolen, eaten by other lab animals or just misplaced in a paperwork error. If the mice got outside the lab, they would have already died from the disease."