Sunday, September 11, 2005

katrina volunteers

Today my student, at a group that prides itself on its English proficiency, said :
"We have many earthquakes in Japan. You don't need to prepare for them in America."
and I said "Well, we have earthquakes in LA, San Francisco, Seattle, and other places."
This surprised her.

Then she said "It's too bad you don't have the spirit of volunteerism like we Japanese do. After the kobe earthquake there were many Japanese volunteer but I guess in America you just use the army."


I said "Uh, there were many volunteers in katrina. I think the gov't did a bad job with the situation but I think the volunteers were wonderful. And I think anyone, no mater mhat their opinion of my country's foreign policy would agree that volunteering is something Americans can be proud of."

She was pretty surprised that America had volunteers 'just like Japan."

The usual stuff came up about how the nat'l gov't ignore new Orleans because it's black. Uh, hello, there ar emillions of arguments but how does the fact that 1 week after the storm the gov't appropriated $51 billion in aid? ok, it should have been ther 5 days earlier and yes they did a shitty job handling the situation, but why would a gov't ignore an entire race only to spend such a huge sum on it one week later? Do people really believe this? Sadly yes i think many peole do.

1 Comments:

At 1:54 PM, Blogger Kirk Dunkirk said...

5 pints:

yeah, I plan on removing the spam just haven't gotten around to it. Kinda like dirty dishes. thanks tho.

 

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