I'm going to play with my design over the weekend a little. I don't much like this template but content is more pressing right now.

I read this morning an account of a talk by Kathleen Tierney at the American Sociological Assoc. The gist is that in disaster situations, our leaders go a little bonkers (sometimes more than a little), while ordinary people take action by relying on established social networks and means of doing things. Apparently on 9/11 there was this massive flotilla conveying people from Lower Manhattan--a million or so--which went completely unnoticed by the media portrayals of smoke and ash and the search for military targets.

Source: Alexander Cockburn, "Bush: Still Popular a Year Later? Don't Believe It," in Counterpunch:
(Cockburn is citing Andrew Greeley in the Chicago Sun-Times)
"'Social bonds remained intact and the sense of responsibility to others--family members, friends, fellow workers, neighbors and even total strangers remains strong . . .. People sought information from one another, made inquiries and spoke with loved ones via cell phones, engaged in collective decision-making and helped one another to safety. . . . The response to the Sept. 11 tragedy was so effective precisely because it was not centrally directed and controlled. Instead it was flexible, adaptive and focused on handling problems as they emerged.'"

There *is* information available beyond what gets into mainstream media. The problem is that it can be hard to find, slow to emerge, not widely distributed, and available mainly to people in smaller pockets (bad metaphor--it's more like rhizomes, those connecting tendrils between colonies of plants). But on good days, I'm hopeful that this medium can thrive and link people in unpredictable ways.