No, I didn't pay that much attention to the tsunami which Hurricane Katrina has been (wrongly) compared to. No, I didn't donate any money or time to help the hundreds of thousands of people fucked over by that particular natural disaster. Shit, I've barely done anything to help the, well, hundreds of thousands of people ruined by Katrina, aside from donate a little money I don't have to the Red Cross.
But.
I am a little ashamed that my humanitarian impulses are not only few, but selective. In this case, I've opted to donate to people I can relate to, even in the most distant sense: fellow Southerners. You know what, though? Fuck it. I dare anyone to tell me, and mean it, that they'd be more willing to help out someone on the other side of the world than someone they have some kind of affinity with.
This has nothing to do with nation or race or politics. It has to do with neighbors, in the broadest sense of the term. I've failed to help out all kinds of people the world over, even here in my own damned city of Houston, but shit, H-Town never got swallowed by water, did it? My point is that this tragedy, in my mind, outweighs anything my "neighbors" have faced in a long time, and for fuck's sake, this time I couldn't sit idly by and do nothing.
As always, I've failed to put my point across properly, but I'm not the focus here. Please, folks, do what you can.
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