Eighteen-year-old Jabbor Gibson jumped aboard the bus as it sat abandoned on a street in New Orleans and took control.
"I just took the bus and drove all the way here...seven hours straight,' Gibson admitted. "I hadn't ever drove a bus."
The teen packed it full of complete strangers and drove to Houston. He beat thousands of evacuees slated to arrive there.
This kid is my hero
watch this or read this.
update: the above links are dead try this
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3 comments:
It's pretty sickening that the print link to young Mr. Gibson commandeering said bus refers to his actions as "extreme looting." It is bad enough that mainstream press coverage focuses on the minority of individuals bothering to grab designer shoes and television sets and intentionally confuses them with folks attempting basic survival, but to equate evacuation of a crisis center by any means necessary with "looting" is mind boggling. Gibson was doing what should have been done all along. All national bus lines, school bus services, etc. should have been mandated to abandon regularly scheduled service in order to arrive in New Orleans for the greater public good. However, the chance of such a thing happening (especially in the case of a primarily indigent population in need) is about as good as GnR doing a renunion tour with the original members.
Yeah, the lack of analytical ability of the talking head set some how still boggles my mind. I'm really hoping we don't have to fly to Houston and spring Jabbor from the big house. I agree this is what bus owners and operators should have been doing since last Sunday, and that this guy did it himself is definately not a crime, in fact it's heroic. In crisis people get bogged down by what's legal and what's not. People who take the responsibility to "save my people" as Gibson did deserve to be emulated and thanked.
Well, situations such as Katrina and its aftermath certainly show the finity, fragility, arbitrariness and ultimately (and in my mind most importantly) inhuman nature of legalism. Human beings simply don't exist within the formal system of law, only grammatical symbols and their respectively assigned values do. Not that everything illegal is "good" and everything legal "bad," but there is certainly nothing inherently good or respectable about "law" from a human standpoint. The circumstances in New Orleans and elsewhere could serve as an excellent illustration/wake up call on this matter to the hordes of existentially dead individuals here and elsewhere, but sadly the event and its consequences, the consequences of responses to the event, and the consequences of responses to those responses will likely all be reduced to socio-political name calling, blame assignment and further lurching forward of our omnipresent adversary "society."
p.s. sorry for posting two identical comments in a row previously...that is what staying up to the wildy late hour of 9 or 10pm does to my hand eye coordination these days.
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