Lessons and Meaning

SC&A wanted to write about a correspondence we shared with Maxed Out Mama. We had written quite a bit when we realized that good art, good ideas and good cooking, can only be diluted if tinkered with.

MOM speaks from the trenches. For those of you who were unaware, MOM went down to Louisiana to search for someone she cared about. That's character.

We have decided to share some of that correspondence with you- because it is relevant and thought provoking. Anything we might add would only detract from what Maxed Out Mama says so well.

"...No one really becomes a person until they love another human being so much that the other person is just as important as their own self. And by grace, through some astonishing alchemy, it becomes possible to see all others as equally important as yourself...

What's really wrong with the political bickering over Katrina is that it is all about shoring up various identities, and not at all about taking care of victims or learning how we can do it better in the future. I think we are gripped by a crawling sense of uneasiness because we are unwilling to admit that in such a disaster many will inevitably die.

If you accept that reality, you can go on to make it better. If you can't accept that reality, you can't even start to plan, because all plans must acknowledge the casualties before trying to minimize them. I think the NO and LA authorities were so ineffective because they couldn't stand to acknowledge the reality. So they basically did nothing. I don't think they were bad people.

I think the only thing that does give us strength to look at reality head on is not being trapped in our own heads. Once other people are as real to us as we are to ourselves, it is easy to act. Until then decent people are trapped in the idea that we've got to do it "right", which isn't possible.

We are controlled by the idea that we have to do justice to other people, and frozen by our inability to figure out how. It's easy to see that getting 10,000 people out on buses isn't "right" when you need to get 40,000 people out on buses. So you discard that plan and search for another.

When you see the other people as being yourself, the instinct of self-preservation takes over and you simply act to get the other person out of trouble as quickly as possible. You don't worry about perfection, you just worry about improving the situation. And 10,000 people out on buses is 10,000 people out of harm's way and allows you to focus on the 30,000 left . Nobody finding himself on a raft with four of his kids floating in the water wouldn't grab the closest one first, hoist him up on the raft, and then swim for the rest. Rescues are one at a time deals.

In the end, if anyone ever does an objective analysis of the situation, they will find that the unofficial rescue efforts and people just walking out of NO on their own got more people out than anything else. Well, that's what is necessary. The actions of the NO government tried to control all of those efforts and they made the situation worse instead of better.

There is a big lesson to be learned from what worked and what didn't work in Katrina, but I doubt we are going to learn it. That failure is going to cost us dearly if a flu pandemic hits, because we are going to see the same thing all over the country at the same time. The IN disaster plan wasn't workable, because it failed to contemplate the real possibilities. They neglected everything that might make a significant difference if a really severe epidemic hits, and they don't really need a disaster plan at all if it isn't severe when it does arrive. They don't even realize they are fooling themselves. They are also lying to their own citizens. We don't have a vaccine and we don't have effective drugs against what we think is coming. But no agency is saying that."