Friday, September 23, 2005 3:05 PM | Zeroplate It's time for everyone to stop cashing in on the Katrina situation. If there's one thing I learned in my time at a non-profit, it's that people love cause-related marketing and will do anything to attach a small proceed from a cause to a larger marketing initiative. It's great that people want to help the Red Cross, but at what cost? The Food Network is running an ad right now that says "our hearts are with the people affected by Katrina..." blah blah, then it says "to make a donation to the American Red Cross, visit foodtv.com Last I looked, the Red Cross didn't maintaing the foodtv.com domain. If you want people to donate money, send them to the Red Cross website, not through your own site to have a chance to sell them crap or gain ad impressions and clickthroughs. One of the GoodYear locations in town is donating $1 for every tire sold to the Red Cross. They felt like that was worth advertising on a sign? Sure, anything is helpful in the long run, but this is just a money grub on the part of the GoodYear owners to snag people driving by who might need a tire and would think "oh, if we buy a tire here, it's helping." I'm all for people pitching in and doing what they can do, and for companies donating money to the cause and for people having yardsales to benefit the Red Cross--I just don't see why it always has to be advertised so loudly. There's a place in Kant's ethics where he talks about a Good deed and how doing something good is not in itself virtuous. People do good things that help others all the time out of a sense of guilt or sympathy and Kant argues that while the results here can be beneficial, such actions are actually selfish because they are done out of a need by the individual to relieve his/her own pain. He's not ever trying to say that we shouldn't save drowning people even when our motivation is to be rewarded or to alleviate our own pain at potentially witnessing a drowning--he's just saying that good deeds not done for good and good alone aren't what we could call Good with a capital "g." Ultimately for Kant, this matters because he says that we have a duty to do Good with a capital "g," and for him this all relates to Christian salvation and Godliness. As a pragmatist, the end result that people get aid from the Red Cross is all that should matter, but somehow, there's more to the story than that for me. {0} Comments Friday, September 02, 2005 2:14 PM | Zeroplate Shock over the events and situation in New Orleans has turned to anger. I'm not alone in this. I've talked to other people who are also outraged at what they are seeing on tv and reading online, and our inability to positively affect the situation right now just makes it all the more frustrating. After the terror attacks in 2001, the whole country shut down for a couple of days. Part of that was fear, part of it shock, and part of it was just an immeasurable sense of loss and grief that made pushing papers at a desk or flipping burgers at a restaurant seem too trivial to bother with. Eventually people realized that life has to go on; that the best way to recover from that tragedy was to resume 'normalcy' at whatever pace was comfortable. The terror attacks left everyone a little shaken and fearful that something so devastating and violent could happen anywhere. Now, we're faced with a natural disaster and a disaster of planning and response and while there's no terror or malice involved in the event's genesis, the results are the same or worse. Unlike in 2001, sports are going on as normal. Television news is focused on the hurricane but sitcoms and reality tv continues unabated. Concerts aren't cancelled, vacations are still on, planes are still flying, and life for most Americans hasn't changed at all. Why is there such a drastic difference in the response? Is it because so many people feel that those left behind in New Orleans and other coastal areas should have known better than to stay? Is it because those affected are overwhelmingly black and/or poor? Are the looters who have taken the situation and made the worst of it losing sympathy for the whole situation as Americans watch an entire city devolve into chaos? Are we maybe just so complacent that we figure that it's 'their problem'? I have so many questions about this, but no answers. The head of FEMA was interviewed on NPR click 'listen' and when the interviewer mentioned reports that thousands of people were stranded at the convention center with no supplies and no sign of help, the FEMA guy just argued and dismissed the claims and completely walked around the idea. All he needed to do was say "oh, I hadn't heard that, thanks, I will get someone in a helicopter to go look at that situation right now" and he would have been acting. Instead, he called the situation an 'anecdote' and repeated that they were getting supplies to the Superdome. That's not the attitude you want from someone in charge of disaster recovery. In fact, he shouldn't be on the news at all. Every motherfucking member of FEMA down to the guy who distributes the mail in the building should be working on a solution, not pissing around with reporters and talking about how fast and hard they are trying. How does it take this long to get helicopters loaded up with supplies? How can it possibly take this long to mobilize and organize troops to secure things, and why can't those troops differentiate between looters and reporters and common homeless families who are being intimidated? If they'd let people into the city to help, and if people in trucks with water and ramen noodles could help, I know there would be people driving there en masse. I know all that we can do right now is bitch about the situation and donate money, so that's what we're doing. I know that none of these blogs are helping and that we're all just yelling in circles, but it's so frustrating to watch and humiliating to think that no one is reasonably in control. {1} Comments

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