Thousands crowded for anxious day after despairing day in the sealed darkness of a gleaming domed enclosure, confined with little food or water, trapped in an extreme nightmare of violence, death, heat and excrement.
Families marooned on baking slivers of interstate highway, or waving frantically from rooftops at blind helicopters passing by on fathomless missions. All surrounded by roiling waters of spilled oil, toxic chemicals, sewage, and decaying human remains.
Then even as rescue began, two-mile lines of ambulances waited to bring patients into the only working medical facility, in the passenger concourse of the New Orleans airport. There, as Dr. Mehmet Oz reported on a harrowing hour of Oprah, those who were too ill to be helped were moved to the makeshift morgue while still alive.
Bodies rotting in the street for days, dead men, women and children left to decompose in their own homes. This cannot be America, everyone was saying. This cannot even be…civilization.
This was perhaps the most sobering of many shocking realizations. Beyond political responsibilities and human failings, beyond the truth or illusion of national self-image, even beyond the physical suffering and material deprivations, there was the sense that civilization itself had broken down.
If it had, whose fault would it be? The people who were improvising survival under unimaginable duress, some of whom interpreted the absence of rescuers and resources as attempts to ignore or even kill them? Or those who failed in their designated tasks as the representatives of civilization? Or perhaps even those who set the terms of this civilization?
Was it the hardship---no electricity or running water, scant food and water---that meant civilization had broken down? Or was it these horrific hardships, plus the absence of response, of the hand of help from unaffected others?
We aren’t quite sure yet what and who most endangered our sense of civilization by allowing or causing so much degradation and suffering. Was it those who act completely on the belief that only politics is real, and governing is illusion? Was it an unfortunate coincidence of apathy and August vacations? Was it simply a failure of officials we expected to exercise an older sense of decency while we pursue a happiness redefined as acquiring and consuming with blind greed and obsessive selfishness?
There was inadequate preparation for Katrina’s assault on New Orleans on Monday, August 29th, to say the least, and an even greater failure in the days after the winds passed. But by the weekend, civilization reasserted itself. We know now that many people wanted to help earlier and were essentially prevented from doing so. But as the outrage fomented by media reports became an outpouring of aid and understanding, we saw feeling become action, from simple acts of kindness to considerable committment, and skilled, determined people doing what they always do to keep civilization together.
Help came, including search and rescue teams from California, National Guard units from Massachusetts and West Virginia. Survivors were welcomed into cities and towns and homes all over America. Baton Rouge and some Mississippi towns doubled their populations, and Houston and Dallas brought in thousands. But places farther away opened shelters, like Des Moines and Phoenix, Los Angeles, Baltimore and Chicago. Families took in distant relatives, and others hosted complete strangers, with nobody knowing what comes next.
Help, or offers of help, came from Canada, Cuba, Mexico, Venezuela, the European Union, the United Nations. A million dollars came from Bangladesh.
Civilization may be nothing more and nothing less than a society’s commitment to particular values, reflected in its philosophies, institutions and actions, continually renewed and extended. It is finally expressed and confirmed by individual citizens and their associations.
The world saw our civilization break down in the Katrina zone, and we saw that, contrary to recent rhetoric, the failure of government can be catastrophic. But civilization reasserted itself, based on a principal civic value, which can’t be expressed any better than in the phrase, “you’d do the same for me.”
I’ve been thinking about this phrase for more than a decade, since the afternoon when it was uttered to me by a black man in his sixties, working as a custodian in a neighborhood coffee bar. When he retrieved and returned the pen I had just dropped, and I thanked him, all he said was: “You’d do the same for me.” He said it with a casual gravity, as though it was something he said regularly, but it also had the quality and weight of a personal mantra of some importance.
It wasn't the first time I'd heard it of course, but this time it hit me differently, mostly because of who said it to me and the sound of his voice. Gradually I realized what an important statement it is. It sums up entire philosophies and puts many book-length ethical treatises to shame. "You'd do the same for me" is nothing less than the basis of civil behavior, from courtesy to heroism.
By saying it to me, moreover, this man was stating both his own moral standard and his faith that others share it in the delicate informal system of day-to-day civilization. In the direct matter-of-factness of this statement, in its earnest assumptions, he was educating me and challenging me to rise to this standard. It is in some ways an ultimate equality, and a testament of faith in human possibility and the human heart.
It’s been said in much more trying circumstances: by fireman in the aftermath of 9/11, explaining why he was starting a 24-hour shift digging through the rubble of the World Trade Center to search for fellow firefighters buried there. They were his brothers, he said, and “they’d do the same for me.”
But it doesn’t require words: every act, every bottle of water a stranger hands to a survivor, every home opened to dazed and displaced relatives, every dollar donated to relief funds, says these words implicitly.
It’s the basis of hospitality and sharing in time of trouble that characterize traditional cultures all over the world. It is more subtle than the Golden Rule, for it carries expectation as well as personal responsibility. “You’d do the same for me” is a challenge in the form of a statement of faith.
Compassion and altruism often depend on empathy, which in turn depends on imagining ourselves in the circumstance of another. This is easier for some than for others. While “You’d do the same for me” reflects an ethic based on empathy, it doesn’t require it. It combines a feeling of human kinship with a utilitarian deduction: we can’t guarantee we will be helped in time of trouble, but if we support an ethic of helping others by our actions, our chances will be better.
In a complex society, individual freedoms and opportunities depend on a shared sense that in the final analysis, we’re all in this together. “You’d do the same for me” is the basic bargain of civilization, the confirmation of the faith in each other and in our institutions necessary to make it all work.
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