Another River, Other Waders

I have to admit that while writing yesterday, I felt an eerie disconnection from reality. Coverage of the calamities down south gave what I wrote an extra-ordinary irrelevance. While I recounted blissful days on the river last week, communities at the end of another river were undergoing social and physical collapse. I was thinking a lot about the disaster in New Orleans and Mississippi, trying to imagine what it would be like to live through that, and feeling keenly my inability to help. Kristine and I sent our mite and our prayers, but beyond that, there's little we can really do, aside from continuing our comfortable life, where flooding from anything other than a broken pipe is an impossibility, and even the most ferocious tornado could do only a fraction of the damage Katrina did. What I feel isn't survivor's guilt. It's more like a heightened awareness of how odd are the times we live in, where we can be pulled deeply into the unfolding of a disaster that has for all practical purposes left us untouched. ($3 gas may be an inconvenience or even a hardship, but it isn't a brush with devastation.) We can be right there, yet in many senses, so far away.

The reports of shootouts between police and looters, and of hospitals taking sniper fire, are extremely disturbing. I can't grasp why people would unleash that kind of malice on top of the suffering caused by the hurricane. The ordinary looting I can understand. It's simply greed, and probably an inevitable response to the outbreak of anarchy. (Anarchy is the ultimate freedom, and as Donald Rumsfeld reminded us after the fall of Baghdad, free people are free to loot.) But I agree with TroutGrrrl that a lot of what's being called looting, especially as the disaster goes on, isn't so much looting as scavenging for survival. It's already clear that rescue and assistance workers were unable to get on the scene, or at least to parts of it, as soon as they were needed. I'm not going to waste my breath criticizing the relief agencies, but the fact remains that a lot of people were left stranded without the means to survive. Were I in that situation, I might not worry too much about what I owed the rightful owner of the jar of peanuts or bottle of Aquafina I took from his abandoned store. Some words that are always appropriate when considering others seem especially so in regard to the Orleansians with wet feet and sticky fingers (though perhaps not to those with blazing guns): "Judge not, lest ye be judged."