Looking Around

Have you ever walked into a lift to find all three or four of its occupants holding their noses and looking disgusted?  And then, your mind by now completely distracted from the latest office gossip you had been just thinking of, but your body too slow to take a deep breath of fresh air, have you plunged into the lift and hoped you can hold what little air you have in your lungs until it reaches your destination 4 floors away?  And did you almost succeed except that the stupid lift stopped at an intermediate floor?

As you would have guessed, this did happen to me sometime last week.  Moving on to other things, I’m glad to hear that conditions are improving in New Orleans and people are playing jazz again in the French Quarter.  As to be expected, people remarked on "how quickly the thin veneer of civilization can be stripped away," and so on, what with the looting and so on.  Ain’t it nice that this thin veneer is being restored so people can go back to pretending to be civilized?  (sorry, I’m not normally that sarcastic, but couldn’t resist - actually I do realize that, on the positive side, disaster situations bring out both the good and the bad in people)

However, perhaps we should note that even in "normal" life where you could say the thin veneer of civilization has not been stripped away, we have looters and profiteers amongst us.  The word used is corruption. So, people were horrified at the behavior of the looters in New Orleans.  What about the looting that occurs around us in the form of corruption?  Where is the public outrage?  In a recent issue of "the Sun" in Malaysia, an interesting conversation with Prof. Datuk Dr. Syed Hussein Alatas was published in which he singles out the lack of public anger as a cause of endemic corruption.  He also says that "corruption is the most serious problem in the world, particularly in the Third World."

It’s like my lift ride.  People were holding their noses and looking disgusted but nobody said anything.

Things in New Orleans have turned out worse than I had imagined a few days ago.  Thousands have been starving for days, crimes going beyond "mere" looting, and so on.  The US federal government and state/local government have been trading accusations of blame for the slow response.

Just months ago, I first walked through New Orlean’s famous Ernest Morial convention center.  I walked and walked.  And walked some more.  I lost count of the number of cavernous exhibition halls I had passed on my left.  I had never seen anything like it before.  It was a glory of New Orleans, and of the civilized world in general.

Who would have thought that this incredible building stretched out proudly on the banks of the Mississippi would one day be filled with refugees?  That it would become a cauldron of desperation, anger, sorrow, anguish, despair and hope?  That for thousands of folks that have just been evacuated, the "unbearable heat and the overwhelming stench of human waste" would be their everlasting impression of the Ernest Morial convention center?