The Worst of Human Behavior

Guess I’m going to eat a little crow as this is a post that relates to the Hurricane Katrina disaster…at least, in a way.

This evening, as I was pulling the garbage can up my 400 ft. private drive to the paved road for morning collection, my neighbor at the entrance to my drive came out to talk to me as he often did. Invariably, as most conversations this week turn, our discussion moved to the problems faced by those still trapped in New Orleans and the surrounding communities…and to the looting situation.

First, let me say that I’m an astute enough student of human behavior to realize that tens of thousands of citizens there are now operating on the basic ‘fight or flight’ principle of survival. The rules of society governing civilized behavior have completely collapsed and live-or-death chaos is quickly becoming a day to day reality. Life’s priorities get turned around a bit when something as basic as food rolls back to its origins of hunting and gathering in a dangerous environment. But that’s survival, what’s concerning is the wanton acquisition of materialistic items unessential to existence.

In fact, though it’s not something many want to discuss at this point while so many lives still hang in the balance, this growing situation of lawlessness has a strong potential of not only worsening, but of becoming a worse-case scenario. Within the next month or two, we as a country may very well be faced with the decision of having our soldiers wade through the flooded city and conduct open urban warfare on what will be by then well-organized gangs of criminals. There is an enormous amount of wealth abandoned in the submerged city which represents more opportunities for power and financial success than area thieves could have imagined in their ultimate fantasies. We may soon learn how easily ‘insurgencies’ can arise from areas of physical and psychological devastation…even in one of our own cultural playgrounds.

After covering most of those topics with my neighbor, he looked at me seriously and said, “Well, I guess there is one good thing to come out of all this…a lot of trash is getting cleaned out…either by drowning or the soldiers to come.”

I blinked a couple of times as my mouth slowly gaped. Surely, I had misheard what had just been said. Apparently, the look of utter shock must have slipped through my stony composure enough for my neighbor to notice. Unfortunately, though, in his mind I guess he thought I was looking for a clarification from him more than a retraction. Without hesitation, he explained how he had lived in that area and I just didn’t know how racial the ‘blacks’ there were against ‘whites’. I tried to interrupt to mumble out some stunned words about how I also had spent much time in that area and that, more importantly, I understood the effects of poverty and desperation regardless of the race of those affected. To my dismay, that must not have been good enough for him to get the hint, for he had to lay those final cards on the table by saying “that hurricane just washed away a lot of lazy blacks”. Yep…no kiddin’.

You know, I truly try to be a peaceable person as I find myself aging, but the first reaction that swept my body was still to walk up to my neighbor and, well, end up in jail before bedtime rolled around. Then I paused to consider the possibility that my statements to him might have actually encouraged him to feel comfortable in sharing his inner racism (of which I had no idea). Though I was speaking in objective terms of human behavior without distinction to race, all the cable news is showing at present are repeated scenes of people of color taking items from stores. Those images do tend to have an impact on the easily-impressionable. I calmed a bit more and pondered explaining to him how what is occurring is a product of under-educated and generally poverty-stricken people placed in a situation of previously inconceivable desperation and not a result of their damned skin color. Alas, something in my gut told me that an illustration of racial poverty as related to race in a region to region comparison would somehow be lost on him.

Then a light bulb went off in my head reminding me that he still had family members living south of New Orleans. Family members that may or may not be okay. From his demeanor, I assumed that still might be an open question. So, I did the only civilized thing I could come up with on short notice…I shook my head in pity and walked away.

I imagine there won’t be any ‘night-before-trash-day’ chats between us in the future either. I guess it’s true what they say about disaster bringing out both the best and the worst in people. Apparently, that applies even to those who aren’t suffering directly from the tragedy, but to those who just watch and then react… Jage