Looking Around

Hurricane Katrina has recently hit New Orleans.  Reportedly, there has been much damage caused, and large portions of the city are flooded.

[oh yeah, so why should you care?  Hurricanes have names?  Where the heck is New Orleans anyway?]  Indeed, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis and other natural disasters keep occurring all the time.  Most people don’t know about these occurrences.  Some do find out, through one or more news outlets, or other means.  Of these people, I suspect that the typical response is "oh", before moving on to "so, what’s for breakfast today?"  (although sometimes a rarer massive event like the Dec 26 tsunami may shake us out of our stupor).  A personal connection, however tenuous, might what is needed to get us to sit up and take notice.

In my case, I scarcely took note of what Hurricane Katrina was doing in other places, until I read that it was approaching New Orleans.  So, I spent a few days in New Orleans earlier in the year, got to walk the streets of the French Quarter, take a ferry across the Missisippi, and sample a variety of Cajun and Creole food.  Interesting what difference a few such days can make.

[alright, so we cannot stop natural disasters from happening, but us humans will always work together to overcome the effects, to stand up again after the blows, won't we?]  A. Nossitter (AP) writes, "The historic French Quarter appeared to have been spared the worst flooding, but its stores were getting the worst of human nature."  what?!  When the cat’s away, the mice come out to play.  Like vultures descending on a carcass, it seems that looters have been finding their way around making their contributions to the recent devastation. 

Human nature.  It’s not just New Orleans.  Looting, profiteering and the like, can be found in times or war and times of disaster.  The bigger the war or disaster, the more it probably happens.  Whether it is Katrina in the Americas, or war in Iraq in the Middle East, or tsunamis in Asia, the same human nature emerges.