Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Civilization's thin veneer

Timothy Garton Ash:

Before our attention wanders on to the next headline story, let's learn Katrina's big lesson. This is not about the incompetence of the Bush administration, the scandalous neglect of poor black people in America, or our unpreparedness for major natural disasters - though all of those apply. Katrina's big lesson is that the crust of civilisation on which we tread is always wafer thin. One tremor, and you've fallen through, scratching and gouging for your life like a wild dog.

You think the looting, rape and armed terror that emerged within hours in New Orleans would never happen in nice, civilised Europe? Think again. It happened here, all over our continent only 60 years ago. Read the memoirs of Holocaust and gulag survivors, Norman Lewis's account of Naples in 1944, or the recently republished anonymous diary of a German woman in Berlin in 1945. It happened again in Bosnia just 10 years ago. And that wasn't even the force majeure of a natural disaster. Europe's were man-made hurricanes.

The basic point is the same: remove the elementary staples of organised, civilised life - food, shelter, drinkable water, minimal personal security - and we go back within hours to a Hobbesian state of nature, a war of all against all. Some people, some of the time, behave with heroic solidarity; most people, most of the time, engage in a ruthless fight for individual and genetic survival. A few become temporary angels, most revert to being apes.

While he make ssome interesting points, he ignors a larger one--the generosity and charity of Americas in the face of the tragedy in New Orleans. Texans especially have opened their doors and their hearts to the diaspora of New Orleans helping them start new lives with more hope than they had before the storm. Similar things are happening around the country. The Guradian needs to tell that story too.