It's Time

What is it time for? A reality check to remind me that sometimes my most stressful problems of the hour can be so insignificant compared to what befalls other people. Tucked away in collegeland with no TV and a really static-y alarmclock radio, it's easy for me to overindulge in my own problems (as big or small as they may be) and forget about what's going on in the rest of the world. Katrina and a movie I saw tonight burst my bubble.

Reality Check #1:
A few days before Katrina made landfall, my neighbor, a meteorology major, posted a satellite picture of Katrina on her door. She giddily encaptioned it with, "Category 5! It's going to DESTROY New Orleans!" Katrina, or what was left of it, rolled into upstate New York rather uneventfully a few days ago. First came the clouds, and then two days of rain helped relieve this part of the country which apparently suffered from a pretty bad drought this summer. (Although, considering this is one of the cloudiest/rainiest parts of the country, a drought might have not been such a bad thing...) That was just about all I knew about Katrina at first.

For the next couple days the front headline on Yahoo! News was about Katrina, so I gleaned little bits of information from the panicked articles. Then I took a tour through an online photogallery of the mess Katrina left behind, and I was shocked to see something like Venice, Italy in New Orleans: water, instead of asphalt roads, checker-boxed the city! I also read Yolanda's accounts of the disaster as she tried to make contact with her family, and finally managed to track some of them down and hear first hand what has been going on. I've been trying to picture a metropolis of millions and countless small towns in the area as flooded ghosttowns mixed with some wild-west lawlessness, but for me it's been a fickle fleeting image that I just can't seem to comprehend.

Reality Check #2:
I saw the movie Crash tonight. Wow. Easily one of the most intense movies, especially impressive considering it was not made as a horror or thriller intended to spook people out. The movie is a chilling account of racial tensions in today's Los Angeles. It shows how stereotypes get confirmed and disconfirmed in our daily lives and how our impatient intolerance can sometimes be disastrous. Whew, it was an intense one, people.

After these reality checks, I was surprised to learn that my university was doing something quite considerate. My school's motto is the Big Red, and it only took a few days into my freshman orientation to convince me it should really be the Big Red Tape. I haven't been too proud or impressed of this ivy league institution in my two years here, but perhaps for the first time my university's giving me something to take pride in. Despite the fact that classes started a week and a half ago, we're opening our doors to Tulane University students and faculty and even offering financial aid. Given the administrative nightmare it is to process even enrolled students, this quick turnaround and acceptance is pretty admirable.

Although it's great that some Tulane students and faculty will be able to continue their work and study this year, I don't envy those who will be making the transition to another school. It's not easy to adjust, and it's especially not easy to adjust to a new school environment after classes have started, over 1000 miles away, perhaps without any friends or acquaintances, and after knowing that your school if not home has been severely impacted in a hurricane.

So I contacted my Dean of Students and told her that I'd be happy to show some new students around campus, take them out to dinner and introduce them to my friends. It's the least that I can do.