This week has been a crazy thing. But I’m lucky for all sorts of reasons, and by the time we’re finished with this column, hopefully you’ll see it too. If you read my column last week – well, for one thing, you’re probably really, really smart and are getting smarter by the minute – but also, you would have found me ranting about MySaline.com members getting a little too passionate about issues. It happens sometimes, and I realized by the finish of that column, that I was happy about the fervor and dedication to viewpoints anyhow.

And then folks got opinionated about some other issues during the course of this week. This time, there were a couple of local issues. One which is downright discombobulating when you try to figure out why the City of Bryant hasn’t fixed a flooding situation in its Forest Cove subdivision. The other is raising a lot of questions concerning a resolution by the City of Benton to require people to sign in before a council meeting if they would like to speak, and then keep it to a three minute maximum.

There was a third issue which I had hoped would generate more discussion, or action rather. It was a push on MySaline.com and my new site, Arkansite.com (See what I did there?), for people to donate supplies and money to go to the Red Cross to help storm victims. The storms that swept through Arkansas on April 9th had me in the closet along with my teen son and his three band mates who had been practicing that evening, and my five-year-old daughter, who was already sick with an allergy cold and really needed to be in the bed.

This sounds crowded, and it was. It’s the kind of closet that’s under the stairs and starts out at eight feet tall, but slopes down to having no ceiling at all. The four teen boys were at the sloped end, and my daughter and I were around the six foot mark. That’s not all. If my husband decided by watching Ed Buchner on the kitchen TV that it was getting worse, he was going to join us and bring the three dogs. Their breeds? Hoover is a Brown Beggar, Fuji’s a Black Wagger, and Megadeth is a Chocolate Lab with Caramel Swirls.

It was uncomfortable in the closet, but we were light-hearted (and one boy did a thing that rhymes with hearted) and didn’t have a thought of actually needing the bottled water, blankets, shoes and cell phones we all held close. It wasn’t until daylight that news crews were able to photograph what exactly had happened during the storm. The area hard-hit was nearly three hours away from us that, so we held business as usual in the home. But the sights shown on the television and the Internet couldn’t be ignored. Devastation. Homelessness. For some, no storage, no food, and nothing not thrown and smashed to bits by the invulnerable force of nature. Worse than that, there were fatalities.

This week, a local radio station held an all-day donation drive, asking people to bring supplies and money. As I mentioned, I put the news on MySaline.com and Arkansite.com, in hopes that so many people who only had a small amount to give would feel good about pouring their money in together to make a sizeable donation. I won’t divulge the results of the efforts, but I will say it was disappointing. Still, I took the amount to the donation drive and plunked it down. I just had to hope that a gazillion others had shown up to donate that day as well.

This morning, my faith in humanity was restored. I got an email from Dawn Creekmore, State Representative from District 27. She wanted to give her legislative pay raise as a donation to the storm relief. Arkansas Legislators voted in January for a 3.85% raise for Fiscal Year 2009-2010. Creekmore said she had been planning to donate the salary difference, and when she heard about the devastation in Mena and other areas in Arkansas, she was compelled to give. Her own town of East End suffered the blow of a tornado a year ago, and she just had to help. The raise was nearly $600, so she rounded it up and donated that amount.

I’m pretty happy to be helping Creekmore to help others, but I’m also still looking for people who want to help. You can still donate at any Twin City Bank or Centennial Bank. Please do.

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