Rob Kall: It doesn’t seem like that’s worth throwing you off their bulletin board.
They took away my posting privileges and basically said I couldn’t post there anymore.
Rob Kall: That’s an experience you’ve had, and my question is, has it changed your attitudes or beliefs since you’ve been through all this?
I don’t think so. I pretty much feel the same way. I think maybe it has strengthened them a bit. A lot of people in the local area are not too happy with what I said, because I live in Bush country. But I have a right to say what I want to say and if they don’t like it then they should leave to China.
I ask Dr. Marble about work, and he replies he wants to avoid discussing his job, but then, when I ask him about how things have changed, he tells me that before the storm, a typical night in the ER might see 70 patients. Then, when the storm hit, for a week or two, it was up to 500 patients a shift. What’s it like now.
Actually, the night shifts are kinda slow because of the curfew and people don’t want to venture out after curfew because they’ll go to jail. So basically, at night, only the really sick people tend to come in… During the day it’s still pretty busy. It’s leveled off. I think we’re just seeing 80, a hundred or so. That first few weeks after, it was very intense.
Rob Kall: Did you see any patients who died?
There was a man who came in, and the thermometer would only read up to 110 and it said he had a 110 fever and it wouldn’t go any higher. That was a friend of mine. The real heroes are my co-workers. Dr. Miranda had to work on that guy, Dr. Seglio, Dr. Patterson, the nurses. These people have really been working their butts off—the nurses, the staff. This to me is the saving grace of everything that has happened. We’ve had nurses, doctors, etc. from all over the country come in. They’re not from FEMA, they’re not from Red Cross. They just came in their own vehicles and they just got here. They flew and the drove. I had people who worked “ground zero” they worked the tsunami who just came—from California, from Michigan, from Minnesota, from New York from all over the country—any state you could name pretty much and they just showed up. They had their stuff packed and they got here. Then I hear stories of people who tried to go through one agency, the Red Cross or something like that, “well you’re on hold. You’ll have to take this class for a week and then we’ll send you down there,” and they’re watching the news and seeing people dying and they’re saying, “you know what, I’m not waiting. I’m going. And they left on their own.
Rob Kall: So they bypassed Red Cross and FEMA and they started getting to work.
They just came. They just came by the droves.
Rob Kall: Would you say that the work that got done there got done in spite of FEMA?
You hate to knock help because they have helped in a lot of ways—the Red Cross, FEMA, the Salvation Army, etc. But they dropped the ball in a lot of ways too. Those first four or five days were really bad.
The national guard was a tremendous help in maintaining law and order because the first few days there was looting rampant here in Mississippi. You heard about looting in New Orleans. There was plenty of looting here on the Mississippi coast. I witnessed it with my own eyes—just driving by and people are in a Radio Shack or K-mart and people are walking out with arms full of stuff. And that was before the national guard had a presence. br> Sign up for the OpEdNews.com mailing list and get an email notifying you when the second half of the interview comes out.
Rob Kall is executive editor and publisher of OpEdNews.com, President of Futurehealth, Inc, inventor . He is also published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com. He is a frequent Speaker on Politics, Impeachment, The art, science and power of story, heroes and the hero's journey, Positive Psychology, Stress, Biofeedback and a wide range of subjects. He is a campaign consultant specializing in tapping the power of stories for issue positioning, stump speeches and debates. He recently retired as organizer of several conferences, including StoryCon, the Summit Meeting on the Art, Science and Application of Story and The Winter Brain Meeting on neurofeedback, biofeedback, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology. See more of his articles here and, older ones, here.
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and there are Rob's quotes, here.
To Watch me on youtube, having a lively conversation with John Conyers, Chair of the House Judiciary committee, click here Now, wouldn't you like to see me on the political news shows, representing progressives. If so, tell your favorite shows to bring me on and refer them to this youtube video
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-While I'm registered as a Democrat, I consider myself to be a dynamic critic of the Democratic party, just as, well, not quite as much, but almost as much as I am a critic of republicans.
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Thank God there are still people like Dr. Ben Marble who are not afraid to speak their mind, even after the attempted intimidation by the Secret Service personnel of Vice President Cheney. This administration has the stagecraft of positive images of the president and vice president down to a science. It's refreshing when the truth breaks through that wall. That's probably why the Secret Service was so surprised when Dr. Marble made his statement to Vice President Cheney. You can be sure the Secret Service won't make that mistake anymore. The audiences for any future appearances for Bush will be thoroughly vented. It's some world we're living in today isn't it? Who would have ever imagined that we would come to this? That someone speaking exercising their right of free speech makes the news.
by
Vipponah (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 1 comments)
on Saturday, September 24, 2005 at 2:06:43 PM
I still don't believe he legitimately won. Have we forgotten all the protests after the first and second election? And we still haven't had any real investigation into the results, because any that were done, were negated. I think we need to give ourselves more credit, as a country of educated humans. Even though we can't prove it, and we're still kindof naive.
We need to believe that someone like Kucinich could win if he got the coverage he deserves. He's the legitimate third party guy you're looking for, even though he's a democrat.
Thank you for speaking for the rest of us.
by
Penelope Grover (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 3 comments)
on Saturday, September 24, 2005 at 5:54:28 PM
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