Red Hook builds the most important infrastructure of NY's resilience - Solidarity.

Last edited Sat Nov 10, 2012, 11:50 PM - Edit history (1)

Occupy Wall Street ‏@OccupyWallStNYC

Red Hook builds the most important infrastructure of NY's resilience - the infrastructure of solidarity
http://ti.me/TyFz6n via @TonyKaron

“Put Some Brightness Into Your Home!” reads a poster at the entrance to the newly established makeshift FEMA headquarters in Red Hook, the Brooklyn neighborhood devastated by HurricaneSandy. That exhortation might seem tasteless given the fact that most of those coming here for help are residents of the Red Hook Houses, the city’s largest public housing project, who remain without electricity or heat 11 days after the storm surge. But FEMA didn’t put that poster there; it was already on the wall when the agency arrived last Thursday to set up shop in the brightly-lit cafeteria of the local IKEA store.

Outside in the store’s parking lot, dozens of women slowly wheel away carts containing crisp new bright-blue IKEA shopping bags full of household supplies. The bags, although not their contents, were donated to the Stephen Siller Tunnel to Towers Foundation, which arrived Friday morning with five U-Haul trucks stacked high with blankets, towels, diapers, toothpaste, canned goods, cleaning materials and other basics collected from the citizens of the Danbury area in Connecticut, as well as MREs.

The line of people waiting for help at the Foundation’s tables against the backdrop of one of the great temples of contemporary American consumption harkens to an iconic Margaret Bourke-White Great Depression photograph, although this crowd is a little more animated, yelling out requests — “Toothpaste!” “Diapers!” “Blankets!” — to the volunteers behind the tables who do their best to find the items in the trucks. And they complain to one another, in English and Spanish, of those who linger too long, over-filling carts from what is a finite stockpile of assistance. “People making us fight like dogs over stuff we need”, complains Red Hook Houses resident Latoya Barton, as she shepherds her daughter through the crowd.

(More at the link.)