Plays Well With Others

You Take the Good, You Take the Bad…

Red Cross

Donate to the American Red Cross and help a fellow human being out. If everyone even gave a couple of dollars, that’d be a whole lotta money.

Here’s the thing about disasters, natural or otherwise‚Äîthey bring out both the good and bad in human beings all at once. That’s what’s kept me from writing about this until now. I just didn’t know how I really felt about it all.

The good are all the people that have nothing left but give whatever they’ve got. They’ve lost their homes, but are still out there trying to help their neighbors out. It’s the best of human nature that comes out. You’re stripped down to nothing‚Äîeveryone on equal ground‚Äîside by side helping each other out. After 9/11, a lot of people got it into their heads that in order to be a hero you have to work as a firefighter or a police person. In reality, those are just people doing their jobs… the real heros are the people who step out of their routines to help someone else. Disasters like this really bring out the true heros living amongst us.

The bad are the people looting stores, hospitals and elderly facilities. The gang mentality out there that takes advantage of a situation and tries to get something out of it. While I can sort of understand taking a loaf of bread to feed your family, the people breaking into stores to steal the cash registers or the electronics make me sick.

There’s a part of me that’s thinking… if I’m starving and there’s no food coming my way anytime soon, I might just break into some store where the food is going to go bad anyway and take it to feed my family. You kind of can’t blame people for taking some bread, milk or even clothing when the stores been abandoned and you’re starving, wet and cold. At the same time, what’s the point of stealing a TV. It’s not like you can plug it in for a little evening entertainment. Now, I’m not promoting looting except as a last resort. Like when the mayor says “we’re abandoning the entire city”.

That brings me to my next point. Abandoning the entire city. The ENTIRE city. Crazy. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anything like that in my entire life. One news report said that this is largest natural disaster in U.S. history and that the last one was the 1906 Earthquake in San Francisco. Ugh.

Watching a news program last night, they were saying that the sad part of this whole thing is that the extent of damage was avoidable. New Orleans sits below sea level. It’s basically a bowl with walls around it holding the water back. If those walls ever got compromised, the water would flow in and fill the bowl. Engineers have been warning about this forever‚Äîthat the walls were only built to withstand a category 3 hurricane. I guess most of the people there just crossed their fingers and hoped for the best.

Unfortunately, it’s also a really poor area. So, although they were told to evacuate, many of them simply didn’t have the money to get transportation out. And that leads me to my final point. A city with a history of flooding, knowing that if the levee’s ever break they’d have to deal with this… seemed to have absolutely no plan of attack for dealing with it.

I know nothing about their response efforts to hurricanes, but I would have assumed that in the hours/days prior to the hurricane hitting there would have been mandatory evacutions ordered. That there would have been transportation provided to get people out. That, if the SuperDome was going to be used as an emergency shelter, it would have the capability to actually sustain the people inside. At the very least, there’d be generators placed in areas that would be accessible, that there would be a basement full of emergency food and water and supplies, that there’d be some kind of makeshift bathroom facilities available.

Anyhow, I was thinking about the service people fighting the war in Iraq right now and how some of them probably don’t have homes to come home to anymore. Ugh. You’re in a foreign country where you’re getting shot at because they don’t want you there… meanwhile you might have just lost your entire family and home and you can’t come home to help.

On a more positive note‚Äîand one I NEVER thought I’d ever hear of in my entire life‚Äîat least a half dozen countries have offered US aid. I still can’t believe it. I heard it on a news clip and haven’t found any written documentation, so I’m still a little skeptical, but it seems that other countries are offering the United States aid. I think hell just froze over.

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