The Washington Post today had an editorial complaining that while Congress and the White House are "fortresses with mini armies and high-tech equipment galore," the rest of the area remains highly vulnerable to terrorist attack. Four years after Sept. 11 and four years after the unsolved anthrax bioterrorism attacks, not much has changed in terms of D.C. residents' safety -- in spite of a whole lot of money having been spent. Um, well, yes. I think I read about that somewhere, in an Irish blog....
Meanwhile, Katrina has had an enormous impact on the local psyche. I recall a friend telling me of a near-riot over duct-tape in a local hardware store a couple of years ago when Tom Ridge told everyone that they should be prepared to "shelter in place," but that seemed to affect mostly the more high-strung among us. (I ignored the duct-tape advice myself -- the thought of being taped into a closet with my three small children, eating tuna fish out of a can and trying to listen to the radio, was enough to convince me to take my chances. Not to mention that I could never figure out how we were going to have enough oxygen, anyway.) But this time around several people I've talked to have suddenly volunteered that they've put together survival kits for their familes, just in case.....
Katrina relief efforts are everywhere. In our neighborhood, kids participated in "Operation Backpack," which gathered backpacks full of school supplies for Katrina's kids. My daughter's elementary school has adopted a school in Mississippi, raising several thousand dollars to send to them. There are Katrina benefit lemonade stands dotting the bike trails, Katrina cookies sold on several corners, and you can drop off donations at every restaurant and store you walk into. We went to see a play last Saturday night, and the actors stood outside afterward, collecting money for the Red Cross. (I'm a little concerned about the organization of all this money, but that's a subject for another post.)
The other day I overheard my daughter and her friend playing with a dollhouse in her room. "The hurricane's coming," they cried, and when I went in to see what was up, they'd moved all the dollhouse furniture to the third floor and the dolls were perched on the roof.
Yikes. And along came Rita.
