Human need for order

This is an excerpt from an email I received from my friend AM. I thought she had some great points.

"...I think, psychologically speaking, that as humans there is nothing more damaging than to feel helpless and out of control. Americans feel helpless in the face of this disaster, and that's why people are giving their time, money, and anything else to help relief efforts. Finding a way to help is one antidote to feeling out of control. Another antidote to helplessness is to blame someone, to find a scapegoat for the problems because blame gives us a sense of control. It happens all the time - "If he hadn't taken his bad mood out on me I wouldn't have run up the credit card by shopping to comfort myself." [I've never done that, by the way] Or like the New Orleans chief of police said when one of his officers committed suicide, "I thought he just needed a break so I gave him the day off. If I had kept him with me maybe he wouldn't have done it..." and he broke into sobs. By the way, have you ever seen so many grown men cry on national television? I've seen more men cry the past week than I probably ever will the rest of my life. Crying is a natural response to a horrible, horrible tragedy. So is a call for justice, for accountability. If we can assign responsibility, blame someone for the chaos, then we have a measure of control - to bring our world back into balance and to hopefully keep it from happening again. In fact (as the quote from the police chief indicates), we'd rather blame ourselves than feel a sense of chaos - it's that important to us to feel in control. And it's a way to get justice, really. Justice helps makes things right again. When something bad happens, there needs to be payment to bring balance and order. That's why Christ came to earth - to satisfy divine justice. The need for justice is stamped on our souls because we're made in the image of God.

But sometimes it doesn't matter as much to have the right scapegoat just as long as we have one. For instance, there were plenty of intelligence failures leading up to 9/11 but no one focused on that because we already had Bin Laden for a scapegoat (and rightly so) and didn't need another one. 9/11 might have been prevented, too, but that doesn't play a very big role in our perception of those events. We could do something to eliminate the cause of that tragedy and so we bombed Afghanistan. In the case of this disaster, we can't put Katrina on trial or hold her accountable, so someone else has to pay the price to make us feel a sense of control. We can't control the weather, so we grab for whatever control we can find. Also, it's emotionally unsatisfying to blame the storm (because it would forever be unresolved), so we blame the response to it. But even though we think we see these as two distinct things, the storm cost us something emotionally and we're pinning the bill for it on the response. As the dust is starting to settle, it looks like most of the fingers are pointed at Michael Brown (director of FEMA), and now that the public has figured out who they want to hold accountable, they're starting to feel better. If Michael Brown goes or pays the price in some way, then this exact thing won't happen ever again, we think. Justice is served and the situation is resolved. We can fix it, we're in control, and the world's in balance again. We can keep this from happening somehow if we try hard enough. For a few days we had the awful suspicion that we're not actually in control, but that fear has been laid to rest. Someone will pay, and everything will be okay again.

So anyway, as far as the response goes, I think that there are plenty of reasons it was slow and inadequate - the shock factor (shock is paralyzing), red tape, and unpreparedness. There were too many weak links in the system to count, and they've been exposed. We realistically can do something to be better prepared in the future, and that's a comforting thought. But when it comes down to it, all this is really Katrina's fault in the first place. No one person or organization or host of people can carry the weight of Katrina's responsibility and the problem with having a scapegoat for this is that it will never feel fully resolved. It's impossible to blame a person for the weather. Nevertheless, we will try hard to make someone pay, and it really will make us feel better in the long run."