About It Takes a Nation:
Within 24 hours of Hurricane Katrina touching ground in the Gulf Coast region last year, MoveOn.org Civic Action created HurricaneHousing.org—pairing over 30,000 evacuees with MoveOn members willing to open their homes.
It Takes a Nation tells the story of how thousands of American families were brought together in the face of an extraordinary natural disaster—regardless of race, economic background, religious or political differences—through MoveOn Civic Action's HurricaneHousing.org program.
Volunteers brought aid to evacuees by providing much needed housing, cars, jobs, clothes, health care, and most importantly, community—offering a positive contrast to the national shame that was widely felt about the Bush administration’s handling of the Katrina crisis.
It Takes a Nation presents an oral history and the only candid, first-person accounts of evacuees within the first two weeks of Hurricane Katrina as well as stunning photographs to chronicle their stories.
It Takes a Nation provides a window into the lives of 29 MoveOn host families and the Gulf Coast residents they welcomed into their homes. The mass-scale effort—launched by MoveOn Civic Action and promoted by celebrities including Tim Robbins, John Cusack, R.E.M., Rosie Perez, Pearl Jam, Moby, the Beastie Boys, John Mellencamp, and The Roots—found temporary & long term housing for ten of thousands of hurricane evacuees.
Compiled and edited by MoveOn Cultural Director Laura Dawn, their stories are presented in Studs Terkel-esque first person narratives based on hours of interviews conducted within 2 months of the storm and photographs by C.B. Smith during a two week tour directly following Katrina’s landfall in Louisiana. It Takes a Nation also features forewords by Senator Barack Obama and MoveOn Executive Director Eli Pariser.
“The goodness detailed in It Takes a Nation proves that in this country still lies the capacity for greatness. The oral histories in this collection show everyday heroes at work, as we see MoveOn members and countless other Americans welcome over 30,000 strangers into their homes as neighbors and friends. It shows the power this online community has to strengthen our national community, and it calls each of us to do what we can to follow this heartfelt example,” writes Senator Barack Obama.
Reviews:
“The letters in ‘It Takes a Nation’ are evidence that there remains a heart in America that still believes in compassion as the first of the virtues.”
– Norman Mailer
“The goodness detailed in It Takes a Nation proves that in this country still lies the capacity for greatness. The oral histories in this collection show everyday heroes at work, as we see MoveOn members and countless other Americans welcome over 30,000 strangers into their homes as neighbors and friends. It shows the power this online community has to strengthen our national community, and it calls each of us to do what we can to follow this heartfelt example,”
--Senator Barack Obama.
“The title says it all—It Takes a Nation shows us that by joining together we can begin to heal the trauma that has forever changed the Gulf Coast and our country. So many Americans feel that we are living in divisive times, but MoveOn’s Hurricane Housing program proved that our core values are very similar when put to the test. We are a great people, and it is in unity that we reach greatness. The evacuees and housing donors who became family through this program are living and breathing on every page of this book,”
--Michael Stipe of R.E.M.
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“Nothing can be worse then waking up and everything you have is gone. Only thing worse would be dying but at least then you’d be in heaven.”
Melanie James: About 4 a.m. Monday morning I woke up. There was no electricity, the lights were already out and we could hear the wind gusting. I thought, God what’s going on? So we stepped outside on the porch and up the street you could see something approaching. It was a refrigerator – a refrigerator floating down the road in some sort of tidal surge of water, debris, and water just roaring in. Water was falling from the sky.
And I said, “Oh my God, that’s not rain.” Because you can smell the water and you can taste the water. I mean, if you’re from New Orleans you know the difference between the rain and the lake and the canal. It all smells different, it tastes different. I’m like, “God, that’s the lake.”
We went to the first floor and began putting sand bags by the front door. The water had already started coming in, so my friend suggested that we get stuff off the floor. And so we went into the adjacent bedroom and started putting things on top of the dresser. And when we turned around that water was to our knees. I remember saying, “We’ve been out here like an hour.” Leroy said “No, Mel, it’s only been twenty minutes.”
I told him, “We’re gonna drown.”
It’s only been twenty minutes and the water’s already up to our knees? We’re gonna drown.
And all I can think is, Where’s all this water coming from? I thought it was only gonna be five to ten feet of water. The storm is passing east of the city so we shouldn’t have been hit by heavy rain, heavy flooding, any of these things. So we went upstairs and we began gathering items. They said on the news to make sure you have a hammer, something that you can break through the roof with in case you need to break out of the attic. So we found a hammer.
Within the first hour of the storm the entire first floor was covered with water. So we made a marker on the second floor wall where we were, and decided that once the water gets to this level, then we’re gonna have to move to the attic. A one point I was gathering items and I was looking out the window and I saw the roof rip right off the house next door. It just ripped right off. And I just started panicking.
There was a woman and a child who was with us, who Leroy rescued because her roof had collapsed on her. Well, we had heard her screaming for help. So he took a tire, swam through the water and put her baby, a one-year-old child, inside of the tire and brought them back to his home....
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