Katrina, Burning Man, and Rainbow Family

This is a fun story if only that the characters don’t really seem to fit together but do…amazing how a disaster can bring about something so cool and bond people together…. everybody repeat after me…. “We want more disasters….let’s let the world get fucked up completely so that we can fix it completely….” I’m not joking here….I hope the world gets douched….and it’s not because I’m bitter…it’s because I think hope can only be born of difficulty and never of complacency…. bring it on…
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KRT Wire | 11/20/2005 | Amid ruin, `a beautiful thing’
Amid ruin, `a beautiful thing’
BY ANDREW MARTIN
Chicago Tribune
WAVELAND, Miss. – The New Waveland Cafe seems like the kind of place one might find near Madison or Berkeley, or perhaps in the parking lot of a Phish concert.
Located inside a cavernous geodesic dome, the cafe offers three meals a day that are served by the Rainbow Family of Living Light, a scruffy assortment of dreadlocked, tattooed and pierced crew members, most of whom are in their 20s. Guitar and drum music wafts from nearby tents, and the Center for Alternative Living Medicine offers condoms and massages.
A few yards away, the scene at the Waveland Market is quite different. An open-air market (a misnomer since everything is free) that offers everything from laundry detergent and clothing to potato chips, it is manned by a neatly groomed staff of evangelical Christians in bright green t-shirts. They are considerably older, and as one might expect, more conservative than the cafe staff.
The New Waveland Cafe and Market is one of the most curious yet inspiring stories to emerge in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Located in a devastated town that took the brunt of the storm’s fury, the cafe and marketplace are the combined effort of two groups from radically different backgrounds who have come together to help the residents of the beleaguered Mississippi coastline.