Government officials and elected leaders urge the citizens to evacuate to save their lives. They warn of the scope of the impending storm and the potential of devastation. They mobilize and priorize. Hospital staff stay on duty to care for the sick and infirm. The doors to the largest facility available that may withstand the storm are opened in hopes that those who had no way of escaping, or somehow learned of them too late, can find refuge.
And tens of thousands ignore them and remain in their homes.
Many of them have cars parked in their driveways. Many who don't are able-bodied and capable of walking. They ignore the warning and simply remain where they are, though they have children and elderly in their care.
With the storm passed, the waters rising faster than the heat, electricity failed and supplies running out, when the truth begins to dawn on the survivors - that the state is not all-powerful, that the mere human beings charged with coming to their aid,are, in fact, mere human beings who cannot come sweeping to their rescue like the cavalry over a Hollywood hill, that there are so many to rescue, because like they, so many have ignored the warnings - do they pool their resources?
Do they find strength in human dignity and sanctity of life? Do the strong come to the aid of the weak? Do they summon patience and resolve in the knowledge that help is on the way, if only they can find the courage to help themselves a little longer?
What is their response to this consequence that has befallen them, a consequence largely of their own making?
"You owe us" .
They take what others have failed to provide, those things required to sustain life - jewelry and television sets. And when taking isn't enough (it never is), they devolve into predation and anarchy, abandon the weak, turn upon the innocent and each other - and all in a matter of days.
In former times entire nations found the strength to rise to the occasion, ordinary people understood that survival depended on their shared common decency and respect for their fellow citizen. That, by co-operating and persevering, they might create coping mechanisms through pooling skills and resources, and to be sure, the majority of those trapped in New Orleans will have done just that.
But, in former times, whole nations were not living in a time of entitlement, where all and any are provided for by an all-encompassing "social safety net", funded by those faceless others with more, who have life easier, whom we have been trained to envy.
Those human failings, irresponsible and anti-social behaviors that once brought consequences in the community - shame, ostracization, and deserved personal deprivation - are today excused, assigned new and neutral nomenclature (all the better for medical diagnosis), prescribed "tolerance", and if possible, assigned the politics of race or class, so that collective guilt may be mined to ensure that self-destructive behavior gains not only acceptance, but state funding.
The predatory violence and anarchy befalling New Orleans is not the result of a freak convergence of forces brought on by unnatural disaster.
It's a warning.
