Sorry for the lack of updates this week. I’d blame the heavy workload I’m experiencing right now but, truth be told, the events on the Gulf Coasts seem to make any musing I could possibly put forth about game design to seem small and trite. I’ve recieved letters from people in the past thanking me for games that have resulted in meeting their soulmates and from cancer patients who have thanked me for allowing them to feel like fully functional human beings inside of a virtual space. But in the wake of the courage shown by the emergency personnel fighting this disaster, I feel like the maker of insignificant baubles and trinkets. I’ve given money to the Red Cross, and I’d urge anyone else so inclined to give what they can.
Not that everything has gone swimmingly. I have little doubt that the death toll of this event will surpass 9/11. The property damage already has. And yet, I’m continually surrounded by responses to the events I find appalling. Scott’s update points out the most egregious examples by our media, our government and our president. The Blame Game has started from the left while New Orleans still burns. Of course, that wouldn’t have been possible if the president had shown an iota of leadership with some level of gravitas instead of attending a birthday party, a sham ‘town hall’ for a failed political initiative and, most infamously, a guitar lesson.
And, of course, the pure hatemongers stepped forward to blame America’s sins for God’s Wrath. And here I thought the south were all Red States. Apparently, God destroyed New Orleans because the Southern Decadence festival was to be held this week, specifically today. Apparently, God was a couple days early, which sounds like a personal problem. Perhaps next time, God should think about baseball, or recite the alphabet backwards.
Oh, and can we please actually KNOW SOMETHING before we all put on the tinfoil hats?
It never fails to surprise me how surprised everybody is. “Nobody could have predicted this” is a common refrain on the news. New Orleans is, in fact, surrounded on three sides by a gulf, a lake, and the mightiest river in the US. The city is a bowl-shaped depression that rests below sea level. The levies were in desperate disrepair, but Louisiana’s economy was too depressed to fix it, and attempts to get the funding from the federal government failed. The city was long flirting with disaster. This, of course, makes the events only that much more horrific, because if government had functioned, it could have been minimized.
As a final thought: before every hurricane, major events or other whisp of trouble over the last 10 years, the press has gone out of their way to scare the hell out of us. This time was no exception- CNN trotted out an expert on the New Orleans topography to explain why this one could be the big one. This was on Saturday. I shook it off – the media has tried so hard to scare me with threads of shark attacks and millenium bomb threats that I just don’t even listen to it any more.
It turns out that guy was almost exactly right, every step throughout his description of what could go wrong. Sometimes, it turns out, the sky actually is falling.
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