"Neither a man, nor a crowd, nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear."
-Bertrand Russell
We learned about our country this week. We learned some good things - and a lot of not-so-good things. We learned about the American people and our government. We learned about chaos and breaking points. We learned things about our policies and our class systems that may have never been brought into the public eye if it weren't for this disaster.
Hurricane Katrina did more than devastate the South - she destroyed the image that the United States had been working so hard to upkeep and cultivate over the years. It took a storm to show the rest of the world that the United States is not unshakable. Despite all of the money and time and new policies the federal government has put into Homeland Security - we were still completely unprepared for a hurricane that officials knew about days ahead of time.
"If we can't respond faster than this to an event we saw coming across the Gulf for days, then why do we think we're prepared to respond to a nuclear or biological attack?" asked former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Republican.
This lack of preparedness, coupled with the power of fear and crowd mentality has turned out nothing but chaos, anarchy and sadness to the refugees in New Orleans. The people who had taken shelter at New Orleans' convention center grew increasingly hostile after waiting for buses and food for days (some people had been there since last weekend) amid dead and dying people.
"I don't treat my dog like that," 47-year-old Daniel Edwards said as he pointed at the an elderly woman dead in her wheelchair, covered up by a blanket, with another body lying beside her wrapped in a sheet.
"You can do everything for other countries, but you can't do nothing for your own people," he added. "You can go overseas with the military, but you can't get them down here."
The situation culminated on Thursday, with rapes, gang fights and fires breaking out. New Orleans's mayor Ray Nagin sent out a "desperate SOS" to the federal government - and many storm survivors feared for their lives.
"I'm not sure I'm going to get out of here alive," said tourist Larry Mitzel of Saskatoon, Canada, who handed a reporter his business card in case he goes missing. "I'm scared of riots. I'm scared of the locals. We might get caught in the crossfire."
In other parts of the United States, the crowd mentality is getting the best of many Americans (on a smaller scale, of course) as people scramble for gas. On Friday, the price of gas rose around thirty cents overnight in many parts of the country - even in places that weren't affected by the hurricane. And as if people weren't panicked enough by the rise in gas prices, rumors of gas stations closing their doors at 4 PM sent tempers into overdrive here in Maryland yesterday.
Although the rumor was false, it spread like wildfire all over the state, causing huge gas lines and, in some cases; some stations did run out of gas. Police were called to supervise after fights broke out in many of the gas stations.
Robert Mabro, president of Oxford Institute for Energy Studies and an authority on energy issues, is not surprised by this reaction. "The hurricane created a crisis, but the roots of the problem are much deeper than that.
"If people can't get gas, they become furious, they become violent, they create trouble. Energy is a necessity."
