Looting and Chaos in New Orleans

I don’t know how to react to the hurricane aftermath in Louisiana and Mississipi, and the other weather-ravaged areas in the USA. Neither, apparently, do the victims, nor the American government. After the September 11 attacks, we got to witness the best of people who have been irrevocably harmed but then rise above the dispair and pull together to improve their lot and hold up their heads. This also seemed to happen in Southeast Asia after the Tsunami, although the victims’ reactions were harder to guage due to the different style of news coverage after the Tsunami.

This time, there are many heroic people trying to salvage what they can, save whoever they can and deal with the disaster as well as possible. But, there are also people, who instead of rising above the disaster to elevate the human condition, are sinking beneath the morass to become part of, and exacerbate the disaster. The news has made reports of people running rampant through the streets in disaster-struck areas, looting and burning and shooting. There were even pictures of men stealing bags of sporting goods like runners and basketball jerseys from a New Orleans sports store. Those will presumably feed them well in the coming weeks when there will be no food, water, heat or power.

Other reports have stated that rescuers in boats have had to abandon searches due to risk from gun-weilding survivors. One report I heard on the radio said that a rescue helicopter had to abandon the evacuation of a critically injured patient from a medical facility because gun-weilding nutcases were swarming about the landing pad, and the pilot was afraid the helicopter would be hijacked.

This morning I heard a local professional footbal player who lives in Louisiana in the off season, say that the storm damage would be the least-cause of damages to his Louisiana home. He said that locals near his home knew he was a professional football player and was away from home. He was sure that his house would be looted and destroyed in the chaos down there.

The overwhelming urge to survive is fundamental to us all. Thank God I can’t speak from experience when contemplating a disaster like this, but I have to ask: Why don’t the people of the damaged areas see that cooporating and maintaining civility will maximize the chances of survival for the largest possible number of people, and it will also shorten the time necessary to get things back to normal?