I gotta 'fess up to being one of those insensitive souls who dropped in to watch the Houston-Oregon football game on Thursday. As an Oregon grad living in Texas, one doesn't often get to see them play, and a few friends and I had had the tickets for months. Nevertheless, we debated whether or not to make the three-hour drive from Waco down to Houston and decided what the heck, it will be interesting to go see what's happening anyway. Maybe we could also find some way to be useful and help out.

As we were driving into the stadium, you could see all the Houston fans wearing red and a few Oregon fans wearing green and yellow milling around and occasional clusters of refugees walking around taking in the sights of Houston. You could tell the refugees not just because they were black and didn't look like sports fans, but also because they had neon-colored arm bands on. Apparently, as part of the processing for entrance to the Astrodome they were being given tape armbands to ensure they could get back in.

I stopped and talked to a few to welcome them to Texas and wish them luck and they were all nice and just seemed relieved to be out of New Orleans and to have gotten food, showers and clean clothes.

Upon entering the stadium there was a gantlet of stadium staff holding giant red bags for donations for the refugee effort. I don't know where the money was actually going and didn't ask. But I peered in the bag as I dropped in a 20 and there was probably a couple bushels of cash, mostly 10s and 20s, so I expect they probably made several hundred thousand dollars in donations just from fans attending the game, judging by how many bags of cash I saw.

As for whether Reliant could have been used for refugees: Probably not. It has a grass field, so it's not really the best for heavy traffic and setting up cots. The better alternative is the convention center next door. As we were leaving, I could see that the Astrodome overflow was starting to be housed there.

Personally, I think this effort to house refugees in football stadiums smells wrong. Do you really think that a lot of middle-class white refugees would be warehoused by the thousands in open stadiums? Hardly. They would be dispersed throughout the area with hotel vouchers and that sort of thing. In addition, there are dozens of military bases scattered throughout this region with large amounts of surplus military housing due to the shrinking of the military post-Cold War and because so many of the remaining troops are in Iraq.

Military barracks are a far superior form of refugee housing because they have adequate cots, showers, privacy, and cooking and medical facilities. I bet white refugees would be dispersed immediately to many of these military bases, which have ready housing for families to have a bit more space and privacy. But these are poor black folks, so best herd them into a giant cage where we can keep an eye on them. Can't have them running around the place "unsupervised."

This whole operation smells a lot like that to me. Like only a small step up from the 1927 flood, when black sharecroppers were herded together at gunpoint into chain gangs to work the levees while white residents were evacuated away by steamboat.

In any event, we were going to see if we could find a refugee family to bring back to Waco, as we have a big house with extra room, but when I called my wife back at home it turns out that one of her co-workers is from New Orleans and has 20 family members arriving and needing shelter, so we'll take some of them in instead.

-- Kent Lind

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