JobCorps is a trade school-like program run by the Department of Labor. Essentially, the military cadet program is like an ROTC for those participating in JobCorps. Participants might be interested in a military career, or they might be just trying it out. But they’re not US military. The uniforms on the three men pictured are no longer in use, Heidenreich explained, and probably look disheveled from the four-hour car ride he and the 12 cadets who volunteered that day took to Brooklyn.
So why’d they end up at Occupy Sandy? Corbin’s speculation to me that there wasn’t anywhere else for them to volunteer seems accurate, from what Heidenriech said. “I spent a week on the phone with the Red Cross and Salvation Army and got nowhere,” he said. Describing the Red Cross as an “impenetrable wall of bureaucracy, even in the face of devastation,” Heidenriech turned to other visible volunteer groups. Occupy Sandy called him back in a half hour, he said, and got his group an assignment in under an hour. “They have it together,” he said. “It was an honor to work with them.”
His cadets spent from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. volunteering on Coney Island, where they carried food, supplies, and other aid to residents trapped without heat or electricity in high rises damaged in the storm. They’ll be back, too, he said, some time after Thanksgiving. “We plan on coming down every few weeks, until things are back to normal,” he said. They’d make more trips if the four-hour drive to and from Oneonta wasn’t so onerous.
Despite the misidentification of the men in the photo, the story behind it confirms, rather than confounds, the reach of Occupy Sandy’s relief work beyond the movement’s immediate circle of influence. The men are there because of a failure of larger relief groups like the Red Cross and Salvation Army, something that’s been a running theme in coverage of the post-Sandy cleanup and relief work in New York. While it certainly does not show military men taking orders from an Occupy organizer, it does show the effectiveness of Occupy Sandy’s ability to get volunteers out in the field regardless of their previous involvement with or understanding of the Occupy Wall Street movement’s principles. And crucially, for those who care more about getting the work recovering from a disaster done than about a humanitarian aid version of a locker-room contest, the effectiveness of Occupy Sandy’s organizing as a volunteer and supply dispatch point in the wake of the storm has produced a space in which the ironic tableau spotted and photographed by Welz last weekend will likely become less and less unusual.
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Great article, it explains everything very accurately. About that day - I had no idea we were even noticed when we were there. The organizers got us in and out, with detailed instructions for our assignment, quickly and efficiently. I have a list of bureaucracies that should take a lesson from Occupy Sandy.
#1 Posted by 1st Sergeant, CJR on Fri 16 Nov 2012 at 09:00 AM
Frankly, this incident highlights the depths of the media's lack of coverage of Sandy's devastation. Housing project high-rises loaded with low-income and special-needs people went weeks without heat or electricity, and it barely got mentioned in the press. As we saw from Katrina, had there been a Republican administration in power in Washington, the press corps would have been doing live feeds from every floor of those projects.
The downside of the media's political monoculture is that human suffering in incidents like Sandy gets ignored, because covering it would not be a useful political weapon. Notice, for instance, how Ohlheiser assigns blame to the Red Cross and the Salvation Army while carefully omitting any mention of FEMA. This would be an instructive topic for CJR to explore. Instead, the press frolics off after irrelevancies like this photo, and CJR is content just to follow.
#2 Posted by Tom T., CJR on Mon 19 Nov 2012 at 06:01 AM