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Where will you be on Saturday? Judy Stillson | 9/21/05
This weekend figures to be one of the more historic dates in recent history. Two major events will take place on the morning of Saturday, September 24. One will receive considerable mainstream news coverage. The other is liable to be barely noticed, though both are of extreme national importance.
The first event, which will occur over a stretch of time from late Friday evening into the early afternoon on Saturday is hurricane Rita making landfall somewhere in or near the Houston-Galveston, Texas region. Naturally, after what hurricane Katrina did to the Gulf Coast and New Orleans, the media has been all over this story. In fact, Wednesday's nightly news broadcasts - a full three days prior to the actual event - were devoted almost entirely to Rita and the expected damage it will do. The other major event for Saturday received no coverage whatsoever.
There's little chance that anyone will be in Galveston on Saturday morning. More than half the population has already evacuated, with the other half getting out of town by early morning Friday. There may be a few foolhardy folks who stay behind to face almost certain death, but probably less than 100. The people down there are well aware that the storm surge is expected to reach upwards of 20-25 feet, completely obliterating Galveston Island.
30 miles inland, Houston residents are streaming northward out of the city. The potential for damaging winds and heavy rain are significant. Hurricane Rita, like Katrina, is now a category 5 hurricane. Katrina weakened to a category 4 before making landfall, but it was still powerful enough to devastate the entire area in its swath.
Rita is packing sustained winds of 175 mph and gusts of 215 mph, according to the National Weather Service Hurricane Center in Miami, Florida. It is expected to dump as much as 15 inches of rain over the area within a 90 mile radius of its eye.
So, not many people will be in or around Houston on Saturday morning.
There will, however, be plenty of folks streaming into Washington, D.C. on Friday evening and early Saturday morning - possibly as many as half a million even though published estimates are much lower than that figure. These people are heading to Washington for a variety of reasons. Most are going to engage in a large anti-war protest which has been in the works since May, organized by the ANSWER Coalition. Many other anti-war and peace activist groups from around the country are engaged and have joined them.
A large contingent of these people will be in the Capitol seeking impeachment of the president. Others will be there to protest the IMF-World Bank meetings being held in Washington over the weekend.
All of these people will officially kick off the festivities at 11:00 a.m. on Saturday morning at the ellipse behind the White House, about the same time hurricane Rita makes landfall somewhere on the eastern coast of Texas. Guess which event will receive more TV coverage?
In addition to the hundreds of thousands who will be in Washington, in-sympathy protests are planned in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle, all hotbeds of anti-war, anti-Bush support. Simultaneous protests in four of our nation's largest cities will be hard for even our blinkered media to ignore, but they'll do their best to give us wall-to-wall hurricane coverage instead of focusing on issues which really are important to ALL Americans.
Joan Baez and Cindy Sheehan will be in Washington. George Bush will be nowhere to be found. The best place not to look for our mercurial President will be at his taxpayer-funded residence, the White House. Mr. Bush doesn't like protests or people who disagree with him. He'll be sure to be many, many miles away.
Millions of people will attend college football games on Saturday - probably close to 6 or 7 million in all. College football is not important, but more people will engage in watching their alma maters clash than will flee a hurricane or protest the obviously flawed policies of our federal government.
Even more Americans will be at home, watching college football or hurricane coverage on TV, puttering around in the garden, shopping or doing what Americans do on normal Saturdays. September 24 will be anything but normal. Whether the mass movements of millions of people will be noticed is worth watching.
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