THE CONTRAFLOW PROJECT

I woke up Tuesday morning, August 30, 2005, to my usual routine of checking my email and there it was. AOL Breaking News, “New Orleans is 80% underwater.” What! My heart just dropped. It seems that the yesterday’s headlines were a pre-mature assessment of the situation. I immediately went to turn on KLAS-TV, the Las Vegas CBS affiliate. They were still showing the “looping looting” footage of the same men “liberating” the same flooded food and athletic store. I switched channels to the NBC affiliate KVBC and saw the “looping looters.” I switched to the ABC affiliate KTNV, again, the same “looping looters.” It was like the Rodney King beating tape. These same people were being shown over and over so much that I had family members and friends tell me those people down in New Orleans were all criminals and they are getting what they deserved. I am talking about like-long African American card-carrying Democrats. The nation was being desensitized by the media’s “looping looting” policy. I then realized that the Big 3 networks are not providing me with what I need, which was the facts about what has happened to the other 99.9% of the New Orleans people.

Even though my cable was turned off  a few weeks earlier, I still had access to the Internet. But four years ago, high speed video streaming was not the norm as it is today. So I went to visit my business associate Darlene Russell who had it on FoxNews, and there it was. The Big One. The Biblical proportion. The disaster to beat all disasters. Look at New Orleans. A major American metropolitan area was underwater. 

M. Darryl Woods, Literary Responder
thecontraflow@yahoo.com