Cultural Differences

I really like this article by Nicolas Kristof of the NY Times. He comments on the horrors and degeneration of civilization in New Orleans after the hurricane.

One of the most dispiriting elements of the catastrophe in New Orleans was the looting. I covered the 1995 earthquake that leveled much of Kobe, Japan, killing 5,500, and for days I searched there for any sign of criminal behavior. Finally I found a resident who had seen three men steal food. I asked him whether he was embarrassed that Japanese would engage in such thuggery.

"No, you misunderstand," he said firmly. "These looters weren't Japanese. They were foreigners."

Personally, I've been finding it interesting to view the looting and anarchy in New Orleans in light of other responses to other disasters. While it may be unfair to compare the breakdown of civilization after Katrina and the cooperation and strength of NYC after 9/11, I did comment to Blaurb the other day how the response after the tsunami wasn't nearly as bad as it is reported to be in New Orleans. Kristof's comments further support the notion that Americans were behaving very very badly.

I've begun to ask myself the question: What makes New Orleans so crazy? I've come to three thoughts on this.

1) Competition. As society breaks down, competition naturally becomes more fierce. The fact that it happened in America may have exascerbated this effect, since our entire political and economic system is based on the competition and capitalism. Knowing that, it just plunged society into darkness, as each and every person saw the disaster not as a tragedy, but as opening up more opportunities. On a side note, my first thought that triggered this theory was that N.O. was in the "middle of the country" a.k.a. in a "red state," and that meant that they were republican and probably even more competitive than if this tragedy had happened in say California or Boston.

2) Polarization of Society. I think that as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, people in crises tend to help each other less. Perhaps this is because the rich and poor can't relate to each other and fully understand each others' plight? As a rich person, getting out of N.O. would be a relatively simple task; could he not understand how difficult it would be for a poor black family in the worst parts of town to get out? In a fishing village flattened by the tsunami, I'd know all my neighbors. Some may be richer and some may be poorer, but we all understand each other and have similar access to resources. In that environment, I hypothesize that there would be less looting and more compassion amongst survivors.

3) Technological Gaps. Perhaps our society has progressed and become so dependent on technology, that we don't know what existed before. It's like when you're in math class in elementary school, learning addition and subtraction, and you think, "We have calculators now. Why do I need to learn how to add?" Or the same question I asked myself in high school, "We have TI-89s now. Why do I need to learn Calculus?" When the electricity went out and the phoen system went down, society no longer knew how to operate. The infrastructure certainly wasn't there. No one was taught how to survive without electricity. No one was taught how to survive on their own. With telephone and the Internet, no one was forced to get to know their neighbors. The New Orleans community wasn't a community at all. The citizens didn't know each other, they simply inhabited the same city. Could this breakdown in the local community have fueled the rampant looting and crime in New Orleans?