Who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises? but who takes off his eye from a comet when that breaks out? Who bends not his ear to any bell which upon any occasion rings? but who can remove it from that bell which is passing a piece of himself out of this world? No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
— John Donne, Meditation 17, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions
This post started out as a furious rant about the people who run this country inhabiting a moral universe where everyone is an island, nobody has any obligation to help anyone else, and the poor, the sick, the down on their luck, and the elderly are expected to fend for themselves. I was going to rail against the myth of total self-made independence and the worldview that dictates that if you’re in trouble, you don’t
deserve help because you must have brought it on yourself. I was going to make a case for there being such a thing as the public good. And I was going to ask who else thinks we can’t do without each other, can’t abandon each other, no man is an island and all that (hence the John Donne).
But who am I to say that? The accounts of people who’ve been in New Orleans speak for themselves. Read this, and then tell me we couldn’t have done better.
(And if this story is true, something is terribly wrong with us. Can we please, please get past the "every man for himself" philosophy? For once I agree with David Brooks: this has been a Hobbesian decade, and something’s got to give.)
This too shall pass. I hope.
By Amanda on August 31st, 2005
Rana puts her finger on the jittery anxiety that’s been in the air this week. It’s not just Hurricane Katrina, the unnerving reports about bird flu, the price of gas and the thought of how people are going to cope with it, the surreality of most of the news out of Washington; it’s everything all at once.
When I remind myself that things were demonstrably much worse in, e.g., the fourteenth century, and that people are always predicting the end of civilization as we know it, and that the apocalypse has never yet shown up when predicted, and that any historian worth his or her salt can tell you that things have always gone badly and people have always muddled through somehow — that’s reassuring, sort of. I think of how everyone freaked out over Y2K, and how I spent New Year’s Eve 1999 with my friend in New York, and how we were sitting in a bar when midnight struck, the power didn’t go out, planes didn’t fall from the sky, and the world didn’t plunge into chaos. I remind myself that it’s probably human nature to panic and, in the process, to seek out other panicky people and panic some more.
And yet: that disaster that didn’t happen was just a potential disaster. It didn’t actually wreck the Gulf Coast, kill poultry in Asia, make the cost of fuel go through the roof, or leave the poor behind to drown.
I fear for us all, sometimes. There seems like so little that any one person can do, though there are always ways to help. Right now I’m concentrating on remembering the way my dad used to say "This too shall pass."