More Waveland

[learnedax]

Yesterday we walked around Waveland a bit, including down to the waterline. The devastation near the beach is pretty much total. Most houses there are just foundations, sometimes with front steps intact leading up to nowhere. About a mile away from the water a railway car was lifted up and dropped in some trees, which is the kind of thing you get with a 30' flash flood. Near the gulf all the trees had their bark stripped off on one side by the wind. We saw a number of cars that were essentially undamaged, except for the trunk being violently ripped open... it's possible that's from the hurricane, but it seems more likely it's from people afterward, looking for food, looking for anything...

On a more positive note, we talked to a lot of the residents here, and they almost universally seemed upbeat, friendly, and more than anything else just getting on with their lives. We served a lot of them food in the New Waveland Cafe as well, and they were surprisingly cheery. I can't help but be impressed at our ability to adapt and keep going.

Actually, the circumstances here seem to have created a strong brotherhood-of-man feeling, where everyone you see waves at you, and if you're walking down the road people driving will just stop to chat with you. One guy gave us his business cars and told us to come have a drink with him. It was almost creepy, but that's just the level of friendliness all over here.

The Cafe itself, well, it's alright. There are a lot of people here doing good, most of them even competently, they just suffer from a few misguided people trying to manage them while loudly proclaiming how not in charge they are. They practice a push-me-pull-you form of seagull management that creates massive waste and inefficiency, which I guess makes them like normal bad managers. We who actually do work soldier on.

More later.

Comments

[herooftheage.livejournal.com]

That's the part I don't understand - I'm an anarchist (well, an anarcho-capitalist, really), and I'm all for organization, when it makes sense.

Just for my own curiosity, do you know if Mike and Yoli Amr are still running supplies in?

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

The anarcho-capitalist part is critical. I'm not an expert in the area, but it seems like the libertarian-flavored anarcho-capitalists basically just believe in turning everything into a free market, frequently with some level of regulation. In my book that's not so much anarchy, since it doesn't involve rejection of order. It is in the strictest sense still anarchy, of course, since it is without a ruler, though regulation if it exists implies distributed rulership. I guess what I'm saying is more that there is room in the definition of anarchism to include those who mean by it a total rejection of order.

We have not seen any sign of Mike and Yoli, and no one here seems to know who they are... which doesn't necessarily mean they aren't still doing something. Were they under the auspices of FEMA? Because FEMA declared the disaster closed the day we got here.

[herooftheage.livejournal.com]

Well, to be fair, what I think is that free market solutions tend to work better than government ones.

I think of anarchism from its etymology - "without rulers". I don't think that means "without structure", but rather that people cooperate together when it makes sense for them to do so.

Mike and Yoli were definitely not under the auspices of FEMA - FEMA tried to confiscate their stuff and threatened to arrest them a couple of times. It is certainly possible they've gone home - when I left they had been working solidly since Day 2, and said they needed to get back to Austin to take care of some business.

I'm a bit surprised that nobody at NWC has heard of them - I was with them delivering supplies caged from the Red Cross one day, and it was about the fifth run they had made that week. Could just be turnover, or could be selective memory - Mike struck me as a person who didn't mind getting a few jaws bent out of shape, when he thought things weren't going right.