LONG TIME NO SEE...

9-28-05
Good morning to all of my friends, family, and visitors. It has been about 10 days since my last post due to the usual 24hr chaos filled days + some other developments. Sometimes I wonder if life is just one big tragi-comedy and the creator is some weirded out LA-type movie director who likes to have a good laugh while his gerbils run around their wheels frantically and for no apparent purpose other than for his amusement...but I'm not bitter or anything...;)

Spare me the stories of true human goodness, beauty, and hope right now. Because if I see another Fox hope -filled -creative -hollywood spot...er I mean News segment, I'm pretty sure I'm going to hurl.

Fiction is fun...but now for some reality. This is an Op Ed posted in the Miami Herald. Yes foks its true. And I'm sure there were much worse stories to share-we just haven't heard them. Anyone who has ever been in a crisis situation (and usually for most americans this is the supermarket being out of their favorite brand of Snackwells) will tell you that life is definitely NOT like the movies.

Heroes are usually NOT revealed and in fact what we usually are privy to is the true nature of human beings. Which seems to be usually bordering on evil and depraved if nothing else. Read on...

Crises reveal character

leonard pitts JR.

The women were on the roof of the hotel, calling for help as floodwaters rose. Then a motorboat full of policemen came by.
“Can you help us?” the women cried.
The policemen replied, “Show us what you’ve got!” and motioned for them to lift their T-shirts.
The women said no. The policemen left them there.
I figured that story for an urban legend when one of my students wrote about it in a class I teach. Too crazy to be true, I thought.
But the tale turns out to be an eyewitness account from one Ged Scott, a bus driver from suburban Liverpool, England, who, with his wife and son, was on vacation in New Orleans when that city was swamped by Hurricane Katrina.

Scott’s story has received considerable play in British newspapers. As near as I can tell, it has not been picked up stateside.

Small wonder. Katrina has given us enough homegrown tales of People Behaving Badly without importing new ones.
Meaning the people whose first thought in a time of cataclysm was to smash windows and grab cell phones. And the ones who thought it a good idea to shoot at rescue helicopters. And the ones who used disaster as a cover under which to rob and rape without fear of retribution.
We find ourselves caught in one whopper of a storm season. Indeed, the National Hurricane Center is down to the last four storm names on its list for 2005. And yet, even among all the storms, and even among all the stories they have produced, are producing and will yet produce, this particular tale from Hurricane Katrina stands out.
Show us your breasts, and we’ll get you out of here?
You’ll have to go some distance to find a better illustration of the utter banality of evil.
I’m reminded of a piece of wisdom picked up somewhere along the way: Crises, it said, do not so much build character as reveal it.

Calamity, in other words, has this way of knocking down artifice and pretension, the devices people construct to keep other people from seeing who they really are. In a very real sense, you become yourself when things are disintegrating all around you.
And let’s face it, more than levees broke in New Orleans. Social order broke. Police authority broke. Chain of command broke. Communications broke. All the structures we build to restrain the floodwaters of human behavior broke.
Who would you be if there were no rules? What would you do if there were no accountability? What would you get away with if you could get away with anything?
Some people got away with being martyrs. Some did heroic things. Some became heroes.
But some, if we believe Scott’s account, could think no higher than their crotches.
You have to wonder how that request for a peep show fell on those stranded women. Doubtless hungry, doubtless tired, doubtless bug-bitten and sun-baked, and doubtless scared that they might die here, drowned in fetid water or pierced by bullets.
You have to wonder whether they were stunned, angry, appalled. You have to wonder whether they found it hard to believe what was being asked of them. You even have to wonder whether maybe they considered lifting their shirts, figuring indignity a small price to pay for salvation.
But in the end, they said no.
We don’t know what became of them. Scott’s account ends with the boat motoring on and leaving the women stranded.
It is an image of petty opportunism, yes, but also one of quiet integrity, and it’s that part I choose to take with me as a reminder for when floodwaters recede and structures of artifice are put back in place.
Even in a broken time, some things did not break.

©2005 The Miami Herald
Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for the Miami Herald. To reach him, send e-mail to lpitts@herald.com.