Many blogs are devoting today to supporting relief for hurricane Katrina victims.
I would like to encourage our readers to donate to Second Harvest, the nation’s largest charitable hunger-relief organization, which is working in disaster mode to distribute food to the hurricane victims. My cobloggers may second this recommendation or feel free to add their own.
For more information:
The Katrina Help Wiki
Instapundit’s roundup
Truth Laid Bear’s Charity roundup
Cosmic Variance is a group blog by people who, coincidentally or not, all happen to be physicists and astrophysicists:
Our day (and night) jobs notwithstanding, the blog is about whatever we find interesting — science, to be sure, but also arts, politics, culture, technology, academia, and miscellaneous trivia. We have similar outlooks on many things, widely disparate opinions about others, and will do our best to keep the discourse reasonably elevated.
September 1st, 2005 at 9:21 am
Absolutely, I second this recommendation. Thanks for this post Risa! -cvj
September 1st, 2005 at 12:34 pm
I hope that I can trust physicists to rationally analyze a crisis that so far has been flooded with emotion. The nation and the “blogosphere” are treating it as an act of God that challenges us all to act as Samaritans. But that’s not what is really going on.
Katrina is really a logistical crisis and not either a shortage of money or people. Lots of people are converging onto the scene to help in every conceivable way. Soon there will be billions of dollars of insurance money, FEMA money, and remittances from relatives. Private charity will have relatively little effect. Charity is just not on the right financial scale for this problem. Moreover, there are problems on the ground that no amount of money will solve in the short term.
At the same time, there are two billion people in the world, on the order of 5,000 times as many people as there are serious Katrina victims, who have lived all their lives the way that the victims of Katrina will have to live for a few months. The best thing to do is to write the check that you planned to write for the victims of hurricane Katrina, but change the recipient. Then you really might make a difference. If you really have to donate for Katrina, you should pick a broad charity and you shouldn’t earmark the money.
I am not saying that because there are other unlucky people in the world, the victims of Katrina don’t deserve relief. The point is that a vast relief network is already in place. It doesn’t always work very well; in this case, it would have worked a lot better if they had invested more in prevention. The right response is to cast blame where blame is richly deserved. The wrong response is to cast pennies into a gigantic, filling till when other tills are nearly empty.