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Being a pretty minimal blogger, I don’t usually follow up on events I participate in — I wonder how many people in documentary production have the time. But I have to take a moment to praise Common Ground Relief. If you have not forgotten the thousands of people whose lives have been disrupted by Hurricane Katrina, or if you have forgotten but have the capacity to remember, please visit their site and support them however you can.
I didn’t know a great deal about Common Ground Relief before my comrade Greg Pason (whom I know and greatly respect from his work with the Committee for the Release of Farouk Abdel-Muhti) asked me to show some of my first-hand Katrina footage for the meeting last Wednesday, After Katrina: Solidarity Not Charity, Reclaiming the Gulf. But I was honestly amazed at the work Sean White documented and described in his slide show presentation.
Not only is Common Ground Relief a genuine grassroots organization, but they’ve been highly effective at responding to the needs of the communities in the Greater New Orleans area. Rather than impose a set of programs, they base their work on communicating with the residents and finding out what they actually need. They’ve become the primary aid organization in areas federal and state agencies have failed. They’ve established solid channels to fill food and medical needs, and help residents save their homes from destruction by damage, mold and the encroachment of profit-driven elements.
There’s a quiet, growing form of resistance to the rapacious, warmongering, plutocratic spiral the U.S. is in now. It’s a form of revolution that doesn’t waste energy either fighting a corrupt regime or pleading with it. They just go and do what needs to be done, outside the system.
