I am setting up this blog to address a number of technical and legal issues that, over the long run, can affect the freedom of media newbies like me to speak freely on the Internet and other low-cost media that have developed in the past ten years.
Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!
Hurricanes raise the issue of "radical volunteerism"
I’ve talked about “radical hospitality” (and “scruffy
hospitality”) on these pages before, but I think you can add the idea of “radical
volunteerism”.
The Red Cross has a rather detailed application form
for the recent and upcoming hurricane disasters, here.
It appears that some of the gigs involve travel to a disaster
location (Texas, Florida, etc) and camping out and working two weeks of 14 10
hour shifts. So this would be a radical
sacrifice for many people.
The Red Cross says right now it anticipates needs as
far north as Virginia. Does this mean
shelters will be set up 800+ miles from the damage zones? When would the people want to return?
No, this is not very easy for me to do; but I can get
into more details on my own personal circumstances on a related Wordpress
blog. One problem is that I would need
Internet access to keep the blogs going and respond to any issues. In a disaster area, Internet service or
wireless might not always work and hotel rooms with normal privacy would not
always be available. This sounds a
little bit like short term military service, or perhaps the National Guard.
Churches tried to set these up after Hurricane
Katrina. Generally, when people got down
to the Ninth Ward and similar areas, there was not a lot they could do. Is Habitat-for-Humanity volunteer labor the
solution; or is it better to depend on Walmart and large companies to provide
immediate manufactured housing? Walmart
is very good at doing this. So is the LDS
Church. Church youth groups also tried to help West Virginia flood victims in 2016 but for the most part the mountain people took care of doing their own rebuilding (sort of "Glass Castle" style), much more quickly than expected.
On the "radical hospitality" side, it's well to mention that Airbnbis encouraging its host to offer free housing in Texas and in southeastern states. I don't do Airbnb, because of the labor intensiveness, and it looks like I am downsizing into a smaller space (July 5) anyway. I haven't seen Airbnb ask homewoners outside its system to offer space, and I don't think it would. I haven't seen "Emergency BNB" answer the hurricanes yet. The radical hospitality issue long distance becomes much more relevance if there were an enemy-induced event (nuclear, for example) in one city, making an area permanently uninhabitable. The US is not ready for that.
What about moral obligations? I know the libertarian argument. Why should we support people deliberately living
in danger zones? But our economy depends
on people being willing to live on coastal plains. I was employed in Dallas for 10 years with no
incidents. What if the same job were in
Houston now? I agree, people can choose
where they live carefully. In NYC, for example, Hell’s Kitchen is safer than
Greenwich Village, because Hell’s Kitchen is higher (both have gay life). Lower Queens and Brooklyn are very exposed,
as we learned from Sandy. Generally
lower income people don’t have the luxury of living in safer places.
It’s easy to imagine a system of expected
volunteerism, that employers could expect to see on resumes. That might include openness to more radical
stints involving sacrifice..
I can even imagine how in the future this could affect
online reputation and the willingness of others to do business with you. We’re already seeming examples of people
being doxed or marked for engaging in hate speech (postings here Aug. 17 and
Aug. 19) Maybe indeed people could have
to “earn” the “privilege of being listened to” to keep their presence This might apply more to privately owned
sites than just to social media accounts – and in fact, until about 2005, that
was really what “online reputation” was all about, and what companies (like
Cloudflare) could be more sensitive about again.
I’d add one other no-no, besides “hate speech” as we
usually see it (and which the Left is trying to expand as mere neglect) – that is
“combativeness”, going outside the rule of law. Update: Sept. 11 "The Survival Mom" on Facebook weighs in here.
Update: Sept. 12 Richard Cohen talksabout breaking down our social bubbles with national service, also talks about th draft, which he doesn't think can ever come back. But the problem is national service could be continue intermittently for all age groups if someone wanted o push it. Update: Sept. 14 WJLA7 in Washington reports on people doing 3-week volunteer camp-outs in the Caribbean islands but did not have a URL for the story. Update: Sept. 24 There is an important article and discussion on The Survivor Mom's Facebook thread about the situation in SE Texas, with comments about the supposed ineffectiveness of the Red Cross, link here.
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