Comparisons between the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and ...



Lord of the Flies in real life

Civilization has a 24 hour shelf life

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Modern humans think that the conditions they live in are natural; that people are nice and that they have no need for police forces or weapons and that peace in their neighborhoods will exist forever even with no authority imposed on it.

Hurricane Katrina hits and 24 hours later its Lord of the Flies. Civilization, like fresh fish, tends to go off very quickly when there is no refrigeration. You should plan accordingly.

Britons describe hurricane ordeal

From

Britons returning from New Orleans have described the horrifying conditions there. They were among the thousands forced to seek refuge from the floods that engulfed the city following Hurricane Katrina. Some 96 Britons still remain unaccounted for.

Jamie Trout, 22, of Sunderland, told BBC News the five "horrific" days he and his two female friends had spent in the Superdome, before being freed by the US National Guard, had been "like something out of Lord of the Flies".

"It was very dangerous - rioting, looting of vending machines, racial abuse, absolutely terrible sanitary conditions." They had been "intimidated by large groups of men" and, Mr Trout added, he had feared he would be killed. The group had heard a child had been raped and found in the toilets with a broken neck, Mr Trout told BBC News. "That was a really hard time. It made us all feel sick. The girls were terrified to go to the toilet."

The group had called the British embassy in Washington from a mobile phone, Mr Trout added. But embassy staff had told them to contact the British consulate in New Orleans. When they had pointed out it was "15ft under water", the embassy staff had simply repeated they should contact the consulate, Mr Trout told BBC News. "That was obviously very difficult to take."

Hurricane Katrina victims

From

…Words can't even begin to describe….  It's hard to imagine - 1,000,000 people displaced.  The term "American Refugees" sounds so foreign.  Our beloved city of New Orleans is gone... for now. 

Watching the NBC Nightly News last night, my wife and I were shocked at the Lord of the Flies lawlessness that's gripping the city now, the death and desperation; the lack of (or lack of coverage of) what seems like simple things our Government could be doing…

Hurricane Katrina: Moral Compass

From:

There are reports of roving gangs of looters, fighting, women being raped, people have been killed. And each hour as we learn more about what’s happening these people are being told less. They are isolated, they are cut off from society and they are trapped or like the Reverend Issac Clark said as he stood in the middle of the filth and the dead, “We are out here like pure animals," and unfortunately that is what I fear the American public is starting to see on TV Animals. We seem to be witnessing the beginning of a sort of Lord of the Flies attempt at survival, and it’s live, in color and 24 hours a day.

I don’t defend the behavior of someone who breaks into a jewelry case or searches an abandoned store for a pair of Nikes in their size, and I also feel there is no kinship between stealing luxuries and taking bread and diapers. I like to think I wouldn’t do something like that in a similar situation. But then again I have a home, warm when I require it, air conditioned when I don’t, dry, comfortable.

I have food and I know where my next meal is coming from, I have countless sources for the latest news and information about what is going on in my city. I still have my property, I wasn’t trapped in the fetid heat of the Superdome and I am not at the moment trudging up to my knees or my neck through water that is filled with alligators, cottonmouth snakes, oil, and muck, and feces and disease and corpses.

I would like to think that somehow through all that I would maintain an air of civility and dignity, and that I would behave with the same decency, consideration and consciousness of right and wrong that I know possess. But somehow I think if I were placed in that situation, suddenly, I might find my moral compass more than a bit askew.

The veneer of civilization: utterly removed

National Review,  Sept 26, 2005  by Theodore Dalrymple

THE French socialist philosopher who was much ridiculed by Marx as a sentimental petit-bourgeois moralist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, is now remembered mainly for his aphorism, so good that he repeated it many times, "Property is theft." But in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the reverse of this celebrated but preposterous dictum has actually become true: Theft is property.

Pictures of the looting that followed the devastation in New Orleans have been flashed around the world. Everyone is, or at least pretends to be, shocked and horrified, as if the breakdown of law and order couldn't happen here, wherever here happens to be. Smugness is, after all, one of the most pleasant of feelings; but for myself, I have very little doubt that it could, and would, happen where I live, in Britain, under the same or similar conditions. New Orleans shows us in the starkest possible way the reality of the thin blue line that protects us from barbarism and mob rule.

Of course, an unknown proportion of the looting must have arisen from genuine need and desperation. Who among us would not help himself to food and water if he and his family were hungry and thirsty, and there were no other source of such essentials to hand?

But the pictures that have been printed in the world's newspapers are not those of people maddened by hunger and thirst, but those of people wading through water clutching boxes of goods that are clearly not for immediate consumption. There are pictures of people standing outside stores, apparently discussing what to take and how to transport it, and of men loading the trunks of cars with a dozen cartons of nonessentials. They are thinking ahead, to when the normal economy reestablishes itself, and the goods that they have stolen will have a monetary value once more.

Moreover, desperation for food and drink hardly explains why rescue helicopters should have been fired at, and a pediatric hospital attacked by a gang on the lookout for whatever it could find. The fact is--or perhaps I should more modestly say that it is likely--that the conditions brought about by Hurricane Katrina actually suit a ruthless element of society that wants to prolong them a little, to protect its unaccustomed power and freedom to extort. In conditions of anarchy, a crude and violent order, based upon brute force and psychopathic ruthlessness, soon establishes itself, which regards philanthropy not as a friend but as an enemy and a threat.

Is it enough just to sit back and sigh that human nature was ever thus, and that what has happened in New Orleans is exactly what any attentive reader of William Golding's Lord of the Flies would have predicted? In that book, you might remember, a group of English schoolchildren, all from good and civilized homes, is cast ashore on an isolated tropical island without adult supervision. Before long, a kind of savage order exerts itself, with the most ruthless rising to positions of leadership. In other words, take external constraint away from even the most civilized (as the English still prided themselves on being in 1954, when the book was published), and savagery results because raw human nature decrees that it should.

Yet this is perhaps a little too easy and falsely comforting. After all, even in New Orleans, most of the people left in the city after the hurricane had devastated it were not looters, at least not of items carried off wholesale for future sale. The roaming gangs that so complicated the rescue effort, and that preyed on people more unfortunate than they, were a comparatively small proportion of the population. While it is true that all of us who were born with original sin (or whatever you want to call man's fundamental natural flaws) are capable of savagery in the right circumstances, by no means all of us immediately lose our veneer of civilization in conditions of adversity, however great. A veneer may be thin, but this makes it more, not less, precious, and its upkeep more, not less, important.

Moreover, there is a very uncomfortable question that we have a duty to ask: Is the kind of behavior seen in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina inevitable after a natural disaster of such proportions? …..

From White House to Abu Ghraib

by Sasha Abramsky for the guardian.co.uk, Thursday April 26 2007 19:00 BST

Thirty-six years ago, Philip Zimbardo, a young psychologist at Stanford University, set up an experiment intended to explore how normal young men would behave if put into a prison setting. Zimbardo's team advertised for paid volunteers, screened the applicants for mental abnormalities and personality disorders, divvyed up the chosen ones into guards and prisoners, and then kicked off the experiment.

Over the next few days, in the basement lab of the psychology building, the uniformed "guards" - getting increasingly caught up in their role - thought up ever-more creative ways to assert their dominance over the jumpsuit-wearing "prisoners". They paraded them around with bags over their heads; removed the prisoners' clothing as punishment; took away their bedding; made them scrub toilets with their bare hands; insisted they do huge numbers of press ups, sometimes with other prisoners sitting on their backs; threw them into a dark, locked closet that was supposed to serve as an isolation unit; made them scream obscenities at each other; even forced them to pretend to be engaged in sexual activity with other brutalized prisoners.

The experiment was supposed to last two weeks. By day five, however, four of the prisoners had begun showing signs of nervous collapse; and by day six, the "Stanford Prison" had to be closed. What had started out as a low-key academic project had degenerated, in a remarkably short space of time, into a real-life version of William Golding's book Lord of the Flies.

Sound familiar? Over 30 years later, many of the same techniques, amplified by the horrors of war and the terrors of guerilla insurgency - some of them simply bizarre demonstrations of sadism, others clumsily thought-through control strategies - surfaced in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Zimbardo has long been haunted by the events that his experiment precipitated. The realization that he and his fellow-experiment designers had created an utterly toxic environment, in which decent people playing guards speedily degenerated into brutes and decent people playing prisoners became abject, cowering, hysterical captives, has informed Zimbardo's career ever since.

Now, he has finally written a book on the Stanford Prison Experiment, tying it in with the slide toward torture that has occurred in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Titled The Lucifer Effect, Zimbardo's volume argues that it's futile to put all of the blame for these violent episodes on "bad apples" in an otherwise good barrel. Quite the opposite, he writes. If senior political, military or correctional officials create a "bad barrel," signify to underlings that abuse will be tolerated, turn a blind-eye to wanton acts of humiliation, then the chances are pretty high that many "good apples" that get dumped into the situation will swiftly go rotten.

Questions:

1. From these references to Lord of the Flies, what do you think the novel symbolizes in the minds of most people? Explain why.

2. Did you find the comparisons of the hurricane Katrina aftermath to Lord of the Flies to be accurate? Explain.

3. Did reading Lord of the Flies or these articles change your view or human nature? Why or why not?

4. How do you think you would behave if you were in a situation like Lord of the Flies?

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