Racist Comments in St. Louis Post-Dispatch Get National Attention

Remember a few weeks ago when I wrote a post about how the racist comments regularly posted to and occasionally left unmoderated on the St. Louis Post Dispatch website are hurting St. Louis?

I wrote that post even before the Post-Dispatch featured an image of a bi-racial couple kissing on both the front page of the STLtoday.com website and its weekend print entertainment magazine, Go, to promote an article titled "The 7 Best Places to Smooch," all about the best romantic places in the area for couples to visit for some inexpensive fun. The resident STLtoday race trolls responded with a veritable torrent of lovely, insightful comments like this one (from the locally infamous regular STLtoday comments section poster Taxpayer, who to me seems like the sort of person the ban feature was invented for, but hey, I don't work at the Post):

This doesn’t surprise me at all. Libs take every opportunity they can to shove miscegnation in our faces. Now that TV has to show blacks in every commercial, notice that they are always posed beside a blonde woman. Not a brunette, a blonde. Its done for shock value. Sickening that a once proud newspaper would resort ot this. Joe Pulitzer is turning over in his grave in shame.

(Apparently "Taxpayer" was born in or before 1905. That's the only reasonable explanation I can come up with for why he still uses antiquated terms like "miscegenation" in ordinary conversation without irony. That, or perhaps he lives a very lonely, isolated life in a cave.)

The flood of racist comments in response to the image prompted the Post-Dispatch to post about the reaction to the photo on their blog about racial issues, A Conversation About Race.

Several local bloggers have responded to the flap over the photo with criticism of the Post-Dispatch comment moderation policies. Shark-Fu of Shakesville and Angry Black Bitch has weighed in on the situation; Show Me Progress has also recently featured several posts on the subject.

ArchPundit has started a feature on Blog St. Louis called "Post-Dispatch Racist Comment of the Day" to highlight some of the most extreme and ridiculous violations of morality, common sense and good taste that appear on the site.

Post-Dispatch Director of Social Media Kurt Greenbaum has responded on his personal blog to local blogger reaction over the racist comments. In a post rather euphemistically titled,
"In further defense of uncomfortable comments," Greenbaum explains:

[Post-Dispatch] guidelines ask readers to be civil, to avoid personal attacks, profanity and racist language. We ask readers to be on topic. That leaves a lot of wiggle room. It also means that we have to make some hard decisions about whether a comment actually crosses the line. We don’t delete a comment just because we disagree with it. Or because it’s angry. Or even if it expresses a point of view that makes us uncomfortable. That means ideas that some might consider racist may be allowed.

I've a quibble with Greenbaums' phrase, "ideas that some might consider racist may be allowed." Some? May? I would argue that ideas that most people would consider racist have been and continue to be allowed on the STLtoday.com site.

Unlike Greenbaum, who is a transplant to the region, I have lived in the St. Louis area my whole life; I grew up here; I've gone to different schools here, I've worked in many different neighborhoods here, and in the course of a lifetime, I've met many, many other St. Louisans from all walks of life. So I know a bit about what people around here are likely to think.

And as a life-long resident of the region, though I am aware that we have a serious, deep-rooted problem with race relations in this community, I am pretty certain that most (not some) people in the St. Louis region would find comments like Taxpayer's above-quoted treatise racist.

I'm pretty sure that many people here find such extreme comments not only racist, but offensive.

And I would wager that the vast majority of educated, thoughtful St. Louisans — those most likely to want to regularly read, or maybe even subscribe to, a newspaper — would consider comments like these inappropriate, distracting from intellectual conversation about real issues (including and especially issues related to race), and not worthy of being given a national platform on a newspaper website that, by virtue of its very name, represents our community to the country at large.

In fact, as I predicted in my previous post, the presence of so many over-the-top racist comments in the online version of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch really is distorting our city's image on the national stage. The popular New-York-based gossip and news blog Gawker recently published a post titled "Five Arguments Against Interracial Dating, From Missouri Rednecks." And tagged the post "Too Easy." From Gawker:

What's this, the weekend magazine of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has pictured miscegenation in action, and the locals are outraged! Imagine this photo, where your kids could see.

Imagine, indeed. Imagine, a diverse, cosmopolitan, metropolitan area of more than two million people, caricatured in the national (new) media on the basis of the comments of a few racist internet trolls. Imagine, thousands upon thousands of people who have never even visited, let alone lived in, St. Louis forming their opinions of our community based on the comments of people like Taxpayer.

Imagine that.

What's Wrong with the STLtoday Comment Section

I hate to knock my only hometown newspaper. Again.

Especially when, like the rest of the print media industry, it's probably about to go bankrupt.

But as a writer, as a sometime-editor, as an active social media user, as a blogger, as someone who has lived in the St. Louis metro area all of my life, hell, as a human being, I just can't hold this back any longer.

The STLtoday.com comment section is hurting St. Louis.

I mean it. I mean it like Jon Stewart meant it when he went on Crossfire and told Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala that they were hurting America.

Any marginally sane, reasonably educated, and moderately moral St. Louisan who has visited STLtoday.com (the online version of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch) and chanced to read the comments below an article more than a time or two will know what I mean.

The STLtoday commenting community is dominated by anti-social pessimists, belligerent misanthropists, racist ignoramuses, provincial neighborhood isolationists, one-note issue pushers who twist every discussion to fit their personal political agendas, and plain old attention-seeking trolls.

If a person dies accidentally in St. Louis, and the Post-Dispatch reports on it, you can count the minutes until someone will jump into the STLtoday comment thread on the story and make a comment about what an idiot the poor dead person was, and how much that person's death has improved the local gene pool.

If the newspaper website reports that home has been broken into, at least one comment will be sure to blame the homeowner for not owning a gun. (This axiom applies whether or not the homeowner was home at the time of the break-in, because apparently, in the minds of extreme gun ownership promoting STLtoday comment thread trolls, just owning a gun with a concealed carry permit magically protects one in perpetuity from every type of crime.)

If a crime occurs — anywhere in the St. Louis metro, any time, committed by any person of any race, under any circumstances — you can bet your bottom dollar that a chorus of obnoxious, barely-lettered white men who spend their apparently copious free time pretending to be righteous armchair race warriors will show up blaming the "creeping black menace." Never mind that African American people have lived and worked and owned businesses and raised families in St. Louis since, oh, how about since St. Louis was founded?

If a crime occurs where I live, in North County, expect a parade of comments (note that some of the worst and most racist ones I saw yesterday have actually been deleted) from people who have never lived in North County, or who fled North County's growing diversity a decade ago, talking about how the family-friendly, neighborly neighborhood where I live, where I leave my doors open to the sunshine during the day, where I'm not afraid to walk down my street alone in at night, is the rotten apple about to rot the whole barrel — the source of all St. Louis crime.

Riiiiiiiiiight. That's why I deliberately bought a house here. That's why I continue to live here. Because it's such a terrifying, decayed, crime-ridden hellhole.

(Incidentally, as a matter of anecdotal evidence concerning the terrible, terrible decline of my neighborhood, I have been a victim of street crime or theft in St. Louis City, University City, Maryland Heights, Brentwood and Creve Coeur. I have never been a victim of street crime or theft in Florissant or Hazelwood.)

Seriously, these comments are hurting St. Louis. I shudder to think what people not from the St. Louis region must conclude about people from the St. Louis region when they read comment threads like this on our newspaper's website. But the harm I see goes beyond besmirching our reputation with non-natives (I should say, further besmirching — we're already competing with Detroit for America's Most Dangerous City every year — do we really need trash our image some more?).

I can't help but think that comments like this are only worsening division and mistrust in a community that has long struggled with racial and social tensions, and has long acted, in many ways, more as a patchwork collection of competing small towns than as an urban+suburban metropolis of people facing common challenges and working toward common economic and social goals.

I don't know how things got this way in the Post-Dispatch comments threads. One might expect that a newspaper comment section would have a little more class than a YouTube thread.

Is it that the St. Louis Post-Dispatch was a latecomer to the local social / interactive media scene — late enough that most of the educated, thoughtful St. Louis area consumers of news had already found other places to discuss the stories that mattered most to them, and so by default the Post is left with the internet dregs?

Is it that the STLtoday comment moderation team is not staffed well enough to catch offensive comments quickly, and therefore those who might engage in a more tolerant, intelligent discussion are driven away by the sheer bulk of ignorant and inappropriate dreck?

Should STLtoday use comment moderation and banning with a heavier hand?

I don't know.

As a writer myself, I respect free speech. For years, in fact, I didn't even bother to prescreen comments on my own blog. It was only after a persistent troll kept leaving sexist and racist remarks that served no productive purpose in my comment threads that I threw up my hands and turned on comment approval.

I am sure that the STLtoday staff struggle similarly to balance their respect for freedom of expression with their need to promote civil and constructive community discourse.

I am not sure how the Post-Dispatch can solve this problem. I imagine those who work there would prefer that people such as myself who are dismayed at the lack of constructive intellectual discussion on STLtoday, rather than skipping the comments entirely in preemptive disgust, or, say complaining about the state of the comments on their own blogs, would show up more often in the comment threads, leave thoughtful comments, and try to bring a little dignity to the conversation.

But frankly, whenever I do leave a thoughtful comment on STLtoday, I feel like I'm tossing a shiny pebble into a polluted swamp.

Perhaps if I really want to see things improved there, I should organize my own cleanup crew.

Ike Isn't Finished Yet

Flooding from Ike:




This is not Texas.




This is not Louisiana.



This is Florissant, Missouri, just north of St. Louis.




This is two miles from my house.

Checking Out The Beacon

Last night I went to a little fundraising party at The Royale for The St. Louis Beacon, a new, locally owned and operated, non-profit news publication.

If you visit the site, you'll find that The Beacon follows the typical format of a traditional newspaper website. Only, without the newspaper. The Beacon is entirely online; there is no dead tree version. But many of the Beacon staff writers and editors are traditional journalists with a long history writing for various print publications.

It's an interesting old-meets-new sort of project: Traditional journalists, frustrated by what they see as a general deterioration in quality of a traditional print media struggling in the face of an ever-more-challenging, financially strapped market, turning to the internet in an attempt to provide their audience with the kind of in-depth, locally focused news coverage of a sort that they feel is no longer being offered by the traditional outlets that used to publish their work.

Ever since it launched, I've been curious about how The Beacon plans to interact with local bloggers and social media. I asked a few questions at the party, and I was pleased with the responses I got from Beacon staff.

I had an engaging chat with The Beacon's Presentation Editor, Brent Jones, who mentioned that he makes a point of manually inputting Beacon headlines into the Beacon Twitter account instead of using a program to update automatically, because he wants followers to know there's a real person behind the account.

We talked about the how the old media tradition of broadcasting information is giving way to a much more interactive news model, and we discussed the often conflicted relations between bloggers and traditional journalists, and the intellecual property dust-ups and territorial fights that have caused resentment on both sides.

Overall, The Beacon's staff seemed receptive to the idea of working with area bloggers to form a postive, mutually respectful relationship, which I think is very good news.

I hope The Beacon's effort to create a viable news publication succeeds. Most St. Louisans I know agree that decades without any serious competition has left our one major newspaper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, far less than the vigorous source of thoughtful, investigative journalism it once was. St. Louis could certainly use a second major source of printed news. Even if it's only printed on a screen.

Fundraiser in Honor of Jessica and Kelli

Kim from Parachuting Without a Net has started a website in memory of her two daughters, Jessica and Kelli. If you go there you'll find information on a fundraiser that Kim will be holding in Collinsville, Illinois on July 13th to honor her daughters' lives. Proceeds will benefit a scholarship fund in Jessica's name and the school cheerleading team Kelli belonged to.

Using a photo Kim sent me, I made the button you'll find in my sidebar to support Kim's effort. Feel free to copy it for your own use if you'd like to help publicize this event.





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As an aside, I know I've been lax with the posting here lately, and I hope you'll all bear with me. It's been a crazy busy couple of weeks with birthdays, appointments, work in the garden, work on the house, and many other things. But I'm headed to the Missouri State Democratic Convention tomorrow, and you can bet I'll be posting about THAT in detail!

As If the Earthquake Weren't Enough Excitement

As my Twitter followers already know, my car was broken into last night at a blogger meetup.

(No, it wasn't a fellow blogger who smashed my car's front passenger window and stole my husband's semi-concealed MP3 player and its radio-broadcaster-hookup doohickey. At least, I don't think it was another blogger. I mean, after all, the officer who took our police report did say it was probably a troubled teen, but Dwight claims he was out of town.)

I will totally blog about this later in more detail. Perhaps when I'm less pissed off, so I can be all perspectivey. And I also plan to finish my gardening series. But, in the meantime, if you're hankering for some lengthy text, check out my mammoth new post on global food inflation over at Momocrats.

St. Louis Bloggers' Guild

There's a lot of talk these days about the power of blogs.

Newspaper editors, public relations executives and marketing gurus all chatter in stage whispers about bloggers and blogging, flashing to the world their newfound hipness to the view of social media as the latest Next Big Thing.

For ordinary bloggers and savvy internet users who follow blogs, of course, social media stopped being the Next Big Thing and became just The Thing to Do sometime circa 2002.

But those holding the keys to the Information Kingdom were bound to notice eventually that legions of formerly voiceless peasants seem to have acquired soapboxes and megaphones.

And now, huge corporations court bloggers' favor; newspapers snatch up blog content to fill out their coverage (and don't always bother to ask permission, or credit the bloggers they "borrow" from); advertising executives create MySpace and Facebook pages, begging people to make friends with brands, and marketing departments pay out millions to social media "experts" for tips on designing the perfect corporate blog.

Among all this talk of "harnessing," "leveraging" and "monetizing" the world of blog content, little attention is being paid to the rights and interests of the people who originally created that world of content: the bloggers themselves.

Newcomers to the blogosphere seeking to cash in on the value of blog content need to be reminded: It's not just blog content that has value. It's bloggers who have value. Without the people who write blogs&mdash without the skill, dedication, and talent blog authors tap to draw in their audiences&mdash there would be no value in blogging.

And occasionally bloggers, too, need to be reminded that they themselves, as content creators, have value. While many seasoned bloggers have come know all too well how important it is to be vigilant about defending one's work, some casual bloggers find it hard to fathom that their little amateur online journal project could really be worth something to anyone other than themselves. They don't understand why big-time publications might want to exploit it, why mega corporations might want to buy it, or why sploggers might want to steal it.

So I'm pleased to announce the formation of a new organization, founded by a group of local bloggers who care about building and protecting the local blogging community: The St. Louis Bloggers' Guild. Dedicated to promoting and protecting the rights and interests of St. Louis bloggers through education, community outreach, and cooperative community-building, The St. Louis Bloggers' Guild will be accepting new members shortly.

Go check it out.

On Whining

Okay, I'm watching all this news coverage of the flooding around here and I'm realizing I really AM being a whiner when I complain about a couple of little puddles of water in my basement. I hereby rescind my petty complaint. There is some serious stuff going down in southern Illinois and southern Missouri today. I hope all the people I know who live in those areas are doing all right.



(I do still wish my kid could bring himself to eat something other than three crackers and a pretzel today, though, and I wish he could ditch the cough that's making him sound like an 80-year-old smoker. Can I still have that whine?)

Dear St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

There is a reason we St. Louis cognoscenti like to call you the Post Disgrace.

It is not because of "edgy" writers like Dana.

It is because your reporting is all too often shoddy, unoriginal, or both.

It is because your articles are often riddled with typos, factual errors, and grammatical goofs any entry-level copy editor ought to be able to catch.

It is because the few brilliant voices at the paper are mostly drowned out in a sea of relentless mediocrity.

It is because your forays into internet publishing have been tentative and tone-deaf; your web design, clunky; your attempts at online community-building, inept.

Post-Dispatch, we don't even HAVE another "real" newspaper in St. Louis. Don't you think we'd like to love you?

Don't you think we wish we could be proud?

Who Knew?

After St. Louis lost the esteemed title of Most Dangerous City to Detroit last year, by a hair, I never expected to learn my hometown is apparently also the sixth most literate city in the nation.

According to a study by Central Connecticut State University, St. Louis is more literate than San Francisco. St. Louis is more literate than Boston.

Could someone please inform the photo lab clerks at my local Target?

And we might want to clue in the owner of that bakery store in my neighborhood with the huge sign advertising:

WEDNESDAY "BARGIN" DAY

The preschool evaluation "experts" at the local school district who performed my son's special needs evaluation months ago may wish to be reminded that sentences such as:

"He is able to hold the marker in his right hand with his fingers but is place very high near the top."

and

"He is able to fastened and unfastened buttons but is very slow and deliberate."

are not proper English.

Additionally, local school district officials might be encouraged to learn that "in regards to" should be "in regard to" and "re-create" may be written more acceptably as simply "recreate."



(Wait-- remind me-- why exactly was I upset that these people declined to teach him, again?)




If this is what superior literacy is like in St. Louis, I tremble to think what one might encounter in Texas.

The City of St. Louis Would Like to Thank the Rain

I have to say, in my view, the wet field in the new Busch Stadium won Game Four.

But Game Five was all Weaver, Eckstein and Pujols (did you see Pujols throw that ball on his back? Damn).

Stone Soup

Walk through this experience with me:

Your power is out. It's the second time this week. The first time, it was out for less than eight hours. But this time, you hear through the crackle of static on your battery-powered radio, state officials and the electric company are predicting it may be days, maybe even a week, before the power comes back on.

It's hot outside. Wicked hot. And, since you live in an apartment with windows just on one side, without AC it's already starting to seem stuffy in your home even with the windows open to the storm-fresh air, because the air can't circulate in a place with windows on only one side, and you can't use a fan. Because there's no electricity. And because you have so few windows, half of your home is also already dark. Even though it's noon, and the sun is starting to peek through the clouds outside.

But these are not your primary concerns.

No, your primary concern right now is the food in your fridge. The food you just bought, to replace the food you lost when the power went out a few days ago. Maybe it's just a few things, because you feared the power might go off again, but hey, you know, your baby needs fresh milk, and you wanted some cheese, too.

Or maybe it's a lot of food, because, like my neighbor upstairs, your mother and sister lost power in the last storm and never got it back. And now they're staying with you, and you have three households' worth of food crammed into your tiny fridge.

So you need to get ice to put in your fridge to keep that food cold if you're gonna save it. Lots of ice, to last maybe for days. Or you need to call around on your cell phone and try to find someone who has power and has a fridge with space in it so you can take the food there-- if you can get reception that is-- it seems perhaps one of these storms has knocked a transmission tower out, because everyone is having trouble getting a signal-- and then when you do connect, well, what do you know! The network is busy and you still can't get through, because everyone's electricity is out, and they can't use their home phones, so everyone is trying to use the cell phone network at once.

But even if you get through to your friend and your friend has power, you're still gonna need some ice. Ice for the cooler, to keep the food cold in the back of the car during a ride in the heat that you know will be long no matter how far you have to go, because there aren't any traffic lights working, and there are tree limbs and live wires down in the streets, and everyone's in this together here and for the most part they're all trying to be nice, but people are stressed out. It's hot and there's no electricity. So a good many more folks than usual are driving stupid around here, on top of it all.

But, ice? Where to get ice? Because, you see, in the short time your power was back on, you watched the news, and you heard that with so many homes and businesses lacking power, there's an ice shortage. People are following ice delivery trucks as they make their rounds, and dashing out to buy up all the ice as soon as it's delivered to one of the few stores that still has enough electricity to keep it frozen. You hear shell-shocked clerks on your crackly radio saying they sold out of 300 bags of ice in less than ten minutes.

But, you gotta have that ice; it's just the way it is. So you set out anyway, in your car, in the heat, in the traffic, hoping you'll get lucky. But as you leave you notice that your gas gauge is hovering next to empty.

Well, of course it is. Gas is three dollars a gallon, after all-- you'd been waiting to fill your tank, hoping that after the weather improved or people half a world away stopped shooting rockets at each others' babies for a minute, the prices might go down. And the first set of storm knocked out power to so many stations that there were long lines for gas at the stations near you that could still pump anyway. You didn't feel like waiting.

But now you're driving, in crazy stop-and-go, no rules gridlock traffic in the middle of the day, and you realize that the first four stations near your home all have their pumps shut down. No power. You drive through them anyway, to see if they have ice, but they don't, of course-- some have put hastily hand-scrawled signs in the windows reading NO ICE! When you walk into one that hasn't, the clerk points to the empty ice chest and laughs without humor, saying no one has ice anywhere.

You keep driving and pretty soon you see a station with a long line and you know it has power so you get in line. But while you're waiting, the station runs out of gas. The giddy station manager waves you away. You got there too late.

Finally, just when you think you're about to wind up on the side of the road in 95 degree heat with no gas, you find an open station that has enough for everyone. Now it's time to keep looking for ice, but there is none. None anywhere. Three quarters of the grocery and convenience stores you pass in your neighborhood are dark, and those that aren't are sold out of ice. As you check out the stores you realize that not only will you not be able to find ice to save your food unless a miracle happens, you also may not be able to buy new food once the food you have rots. Because the few stores still open are already sold out of almost everything cold.

Many of them are also sold out of batteries, flashlights, weather radios, charcoal, and bottled water. And you might need that bottled water. Because last time the power went out, your neighborhood wound up on a boil order.

But you have an electric stove. So you can't boil water, unless you can manage to build a fire in your backyard.

Some stores are running on generator power, and are only taking cash.

Which you don't have much of, because you usually use your debit card-- everyone does these days-- and it's going to be quite a chore to get more cash, because the nearby ATMs all seem to lack power.

This is the sort of situation the people in my apartment complex were faced with this weekend, when power went out across the complex for the second time. And many more people in blacked-out neighborhoods all over town faced similar difficulties.

A lot of people in my area left on Friday, after the storm, to spend the night in other parts of town that still had lights, fans, air conditioning, grocery stores, gas stations, banks, and pharmacies. I was one of those who left.

But some didn't. Among my neighbors, some had no place to go; their friends and relatives nearby had also lost power; they couldn't afford to stay in one of the very few hotels that still had power and available rooms. Others were wary of leaving their property unattended in a place with no power, worried that thieves might take advantage of the situation if our complex became an unlighted ghost town.

When my family and I returned on Saturday afternoon to check on our home, see if the power was back, and, if it wasn't, try to decide what to do next, this is what I saw:

People were outside, in numbers I'd never seen outside before, in clusters, sitting in shade in lawn chairs and picnic tables that had been pulled to the coolest spots under the leafiest trees.

People with portable grills had brought them out near the tables and chairs. People with charcoal had filled the portable grills and a few stationery grills owned by the complex, and people with matches and lighter fluid had lit them. People with meat that was still good had brought it to cook. People with chips, pretzels, already-popped popcorn, and bottled drinks had brought them out for everyone to share.

People with flashlights and candles were sharing their lights with people who didn't have any. People with working battery-operated radios had brought them out so everyone could listen. Young people fanned elderly people with paper fans. Everyone chatted animatedly, sharing news about where power had already come back on, what the weather forecast was for tomorrow, where someone had been able to get cheap gas, or a bag of ice.

Children ran together, laughing, in the shade, sharing their non-electronic toys and spraying each other with water.

My entire apartment complex had come out of their dark homes and pooled what supplies they had left to share as a group, and the result looked like AN ENORMOUS BLOCK PARTY.

Watching my neighbors help one another, I felt irrationally guilty for having left to stay with relatives the night before.

I have never felt so proud to live in this neighborhood, ever.

From now on, whenever I find myself in a moment of extreme frustration with humanity, I think I'll call up my memory of this past Saturday afternoon.

15 Things I Love

1.) Cold drinks.

2.) Hot showers.

3.) Clean water.

4.) Lights at night.

6.) Air conditioning.

7.) Clean laundry and dishes, washed in a machine with warm water and soap instead of in a sink with cold water by hand.

8.) Gasoline available at gas stations within a 10 mile radius.

9.) Dairy products available at stores, which have lights on.

10.) Medicine available at drugstores.

11.) Working telephone lines.

12.) Working traffic lights.

13.) The guy at the Metro Mart who, instead of getting annoyed or angry with me when I filled two gargantuan soda cups to the brim with nothing but ice and set them down on the counter with the lids barely on and gave him a look that dared him to chide me for brazenly using a soda machine to get ice instead of soda after hours on the road stopping at station after station trying to find gas for our car and ice for our cooler, smiled at me with genuine sympathy and only charged me 61 cents.

14.) My mother-in-law, who let us spend the night at her place when our power went out for the second time, and told us we could stay there indefinitely until the power came back on.

15.) The local bloggers I've met in person once or not at all who offered to let me and my family stay with them until my power came back on.

I'm lucky to have power again so soon. I'm even luckier to have had the money, the transportation, and the family and friends to make my experience of this situation more an inconvenience than a crisis.

There are still many people in my area who are waiting for help. People who have spent days without air conditioning in extreme heat they are not accustomed to having to endure. People who have lost all the food in their refrigerators, and can't buy more because none of the stores in their area have power. People who have been told to boil all of their drinking water, but have no electricity to heat water with.

I know the electric company has working hard to restore power in my neighborhood, because I see that many homes and businesses that were dark a day ago now have their power back on. But every day this situation persists, danger persists, especially for the elderly, the disabled, and small children.

I truly hope the lights come back on for everyone very soon.

Power Out

A second set of strong storms came through this afternoon and knocked my power out again, and I expect my home is now somewhere near the end of a very loooooong list to have power restored. Earlier today I heard estimates that the two sets of storms have knocked out power to over half a million households (which means over 2 million people) on the west side of the Mississippi alone. Our electric company predicts that it may take up to five days to restore power to most customers. And it is still very, very hot.

I am staying the night tonight with my mother-in-law in Imperial. More on horizontal rain, traffic signs pushed flat to the ground, Mad Max driving on unlighted streets, and 30 minute lines for gasoline when I've got the time.

I am very grateful to have a place to stay for tonight with clean water and air conditioning, but many people in my area are not so fortunate. I have heard very little about this situation on the national news, which I find disturbing.

Let me reiterate: there are OVER TWO MILLION people in my community currently without power, and many without drinkable water, in the middle of a serious heat wave, and conditions may not improve significantly for several days. This is a serious situation in need of national attention.

Not that I have much hope after the utterly reprehensible government response last year's hurricanes down south, which damaged a much larger area much more severely, but hey . . .

Hell Hath No Fury Like Ma Nature Having a Hot Flash

So, do y'all know it's been hot here?

I mean, HOT?

I am sure you DO know, if you live in the States, because from what I hear, it's been unusually hot across the country lately. But here it's been hot, and humid. Suffocatingly humid. Disgustingly humid. So humid that dew soaks the cars in our apartment complex parking lot every morning as though it had rained.

My city, you see, is at the intersection of two enormous rivers, smack dab in the middle of a prairie flood plain.

As any native St. Louisan will tell you, Hot + Humid summers are our specialty.

But this past week has been even hotter than usual. A week of temps at or above 100 degrees Farenheit. Heat indexes as high as 115.

Okay, okay, dwellers of tropical isles. You may call me on my whine. I permit you. I know it gets just as hot and humid where you live. I know in some places of the world weather like this can last for weeks at a time.

But tell me: does it also get below freezing there in the wintertime? Does it snow? And then invariably sleet the next day, so that there is a treacherous slippery-slick crust of ice on top of the snow that you must punch through with a shovel in order to clear a path from your home?

I thought not.

You see, here in the midwest, even though hot and humid weather comes back every summer, we can't get used this heat. We just can't. Because if we did, then we would be freezing our ample midwestern butts off every winter.

So, we do the only reasonable thing we can. We compromise. We set our internal thermostats at something around 60-70 degrees. And complain about the weather for 6 months out of the year.

But I digress.

It's been hot. Even hotter than it usually gets here in August (and it's only July).

Stay-inside-with-your-lights-off-and-your-air-conditioning-cranked-and-suck-
ice-chips-in-the-dark hot.

Fucking hot.

(Only you know, you don't really want to, ahem, because it's too HOT).

And apparently, even the sky itself here felt it was too hot.

Because last night, a strong but fairly normal heat-driven summer thunderstorm popped up on the east side of the river. This was not a predicted thunderstorm. But everyone around here knows the risk of such pop-up storms is high at this time of year. After all, it's hot, and humid.

The storm raged for a while on the east side, causing typical thunderstorm damage. Then it veered southwest, crossing the thick air above the Mississippi.

And suddenly, a typical pop-up thunderstorm became the worst non-tornado storm to hit the St. Louis metro area in years. Packing 80-mile-an-hour straightline winds, it raced into the St. Louis metro before the local television news stations could even put out a severe thunderstorm warning on television.

I know, because I watched from my window as the storm came up. The sky darkened rapidly. The wind whipped up almost instantly, bowing the trees in the green commons area outside my apartment at severe angles, pushing a torrent of leaves and litter through the air.

"Is there a tornado warning or a thunderstorm warning for our area?" I asked my husband, who was watching TV.

He flipped through the channels. There were warnings for Illinois. For us, there was nothing.

Our neighbors began coming out on their balconies, shouting to one another.

"Do you see that?"

"Do you see those clouds?"

"Have you heard anything?"

"I don't hear the sirens!"

"Should I move my car out from under that tree?"

All I could think was, Get back inside, morons. Who needs a warning to know this is serious shit?

And yet I myself stood at my patio door, with nothing but a screen between myself and the coming storm, transfixed.

The power flickered. We turned off our computer. The lights flipped on and off rapidly, and then went out.

The sky turned green. Then yellow, then red. Lightning lit up the clouds. Whole branches ripped from the trees. At first, there was no rain.

The lack of rain made me nervous. Having lived all my life with this kind of storm, I know that when it rains hard, the winds usually aren't so bad.

But lightning and no rain is usually a recipe for strong straight-line winds, hail, or tornadoes.

Then the rain came, in nearly horizontal torrents. And the wind remained. Suddenly, we heard sirens-- not the storm warning sirens, but police sirens. More than a dozen police car sirens, sounding at once-- more than could possibly be responding to a single event.

"Do you think the storm sirens have been knocked out, and they are trying to tell us there's a storm warning by turning all of the police sirens on?" my husband wondered. We had no idea. We had no power. Our battery-operated radio was out of juice, and we didn't have enough replacement batteries. Our cell phones were having trouble connecting. The few friends and family members we had been able to get through to had no information about the storms; they had power, but had heard nothing conclusive on the news about the strength of the storms in our area.

All the while, our son wandered through the house, giggling, waving a flashlight. He'd been frightened at first by the sudden power outage (despite the fact that we lose power regularly here when it rains, he seems frightened at first almost every time), but in minutes he'd decided it was all quite an excellent game. He smiled at the candles we'd lit, calling them "decorations." "Look outside, Mommy! Look, Daddy! Windy!" he kept admonishing us, gleefully.

We tried to keep him corralled in an interior hallway, away from the windows. We don't have a basement.

Oridnarily I am terrified during strong storms because of this fact. Every midwesterner knows that a residence without a basement is a disaster waiting to happen in tornado season. During a tornado, if you don't have a basement, you might as well be taking shelter in a house of cards.

And yet, this storm had come up so quickly, and seemed so unreal, that my customary fear took a backseat to sheer wonder at the sudden ferocity of the skies.

In less than an hour, it was over. Tree branches, leaves, and trash littered the ground, but there were no felled limbs on our car, or on any of our neighbors'. Pieces of siding had ripped off of a nearby building. The power was out for blocks in every direction, and the power company wouldn't answer our calls. But otherwise, it seemed, our neighborhood had escaped major damage.

We used the last of our hot water to give our son a bath and take quick showers ourselves. Then we opened our freezer lightning-quick to get out our carton of ice cream. If our power was going to be off indefinitely, and ther was a fair chance that all of our food in the freezer might melt, I reasoned, at least we could eat our damn ice cream.

So, my husband and I ate fresh sugared strawberries and ice cream by candlelight, all our windows open to the absolute darkness outside to catch any rain-cooled breeze that might come, listening to crickets singing in the uncanny-seeming, natural silence.

All in all, it was actually pretty relaxing. Even romantic.

Our power was restored just after midnight. It wasn't until I turned on the TV early this morning that I realized the extent of the damage to our area.

450,000 households in my area lost power during the storm. Tens of thousands of people are still without power today.

And the weather forcast predicts a high today of at least 101 degrees. The furious storms did nothing, absolutely nothing, to break the heat wave. And tens of thousands of people are today without air conditioning, in 101 degree heat.

There are power lines and felled trees across roads all over town, not to mention a number of intersections without power to the traffic lights, which the local television stations say are snarling traffic.

My entire (large) county is under an indefinite boil order, because our water treatment system was knocked out.

And the winds caused serious property damage all over town, on both sides of the river. Semi trucks were pushed across highways. Trains were pushed off their tracks. The airport apparently had a piece of its roof blown off.

We are told to expect more storms tonight. I really, truly hope they're nothing like yesterday's.

Edited to add: If any of my local blogger or RL friends are without power at home but are reading this because you have managed to get temporary internet access at work or something, you are welcome to hang at my place in the AC this afternoon/evening. Drop me a comment here or send me an email at stellafitzgerald AT hotmail.com-- I'll be checking. My apartment is tiny and there are no guarantees my power won't go out again if it rains tonight, of course. But I offer what I have.

Sometimes I Think We Should Bring Back the Stocks and PIllory in the Town Square

Local jackasses SET FIRE TO A PUBLIC LIBRARY. Twice. Any other ideas on appropriate punishments for such behavior?