Discolor Online

Good people everywhere, seeing a need, have organized together to help people in Katrina's wake. While my friends' families in Mississippi are receiving frozen chickens as aid from official organizations, it's been their sons and daughters (and their sons' and daughters' employers and communities) that have coordinated and distributed boxes of clothing, healthy ready-to-eat foods, and basics like soap and tooth brushes and towels. Similarly, church groups all over Oklahoma have donated their retreat cabins in Falls Church to be used as refugee shelters for victims of Hurricane Katrina.

One woman, her children, and her elderly parents decided to take the initiative and bring donations and supplies to "their" church's cabin, to help make the incoming refugees more comfortable, and posted photos and the story of their experience here (Warning, this link is to a conspiracy message board, so judge accordingly.) Among the many appalling things she says she was told when her family arrived with their donations was that just about every conceiveable thing "could cause a riot" and would not be allowed. Use of kitchen facilities will not be allowed ("liability issues"), meals will be brought in twice a day by FEMA, no one will be allowed to enter the camp "without credentials" and no refugee will be allowed to return if they leave the camp for any reason. Check out the response to the donation of breakfast cereal and fresh apples:

We then lug all food products requiring cooking back to the car. We start unloading our snacks. Mom appeared to have cornered the market in five counties on pop-tarts and apparently that was an acceptable snack so the guy started shoving them under the counter. He said these would be good to tied people over in between their two meals a day. But he tells my mother she must take all the breakfast cereal back. My mother protests that cereal requires no cooking. "There will be no milk, ma'am." My mother points to the huge industrial double-wide refrigerator the church had just purchased in the past year. "Ma'am, you don't understand...

It could cause a riot."

He then points to the vegetables and fruit. "You'll have to take that back as well. It looks like you've got about 10 apples there. I'm about to bring in 40 men. What would we do then?"

My mother, in her sweet, soft voice says, "Quarter them?"

"No ma'am. FEMA said no...

It could cause a riot. You don't understand the type of people that are about to come here...."

You don't understand the type of people that are about to come here. Bad people. Lesser people. Maybe even brown people. People who somehow deserved what happened to them. Right?

Wow.