This week marks the thirteenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall in New Orleans. Since it was the original reason for this blog back in October of 2005, it always stands as a moment to reflect. A long time has passed, and there has been a great deal of healing, but the past is always worth remembering.
And oddly enough, Katrina has come up in the news lately. Revised estimates of the death toll of Hurricane Maria, which struck Puerto Rico last year, now nears 3,000. Besides the pure tragedy of 3,000 deaths, there is the unfortunate fact that our President, when he toured Puerto Rico after the storm last year and was told that there were only 16 deaths, said:
If you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina, and you look at the tremendous — hundred and hundred and hundreds of people that died. And you look at what happened here with really a storm that was totally overpowering. Nobody's ever seen anything like this. And what is your death count at this point, 17? …. You can be very proud of all of your people, all of our people working together. Sixteen versus literally thousands of people.
Now that the Puerto Rico death toll has far surpassed the 1,800 deaths attributed to Katrina, the press is revisiting this statement.
It was a stupid statement then, and it is a stupid statement now. Something in the hard wiring of human brains tempts us to make comparisons. Nothing is ever taken as an absolute, which a bad thing in and of itself. For something to register in our national consciousness, it has to be better or worse than something else. No one is interested in the ninth-worst hurricane in U.S history, let alone the the fiftieth. We decide if something is worthy of our attention based on how much worse it was that the worst we know of. “Sure, there was a flood in Houston, but was it worse than Katrina? Rita? Sandy?” If not, then why worry?
What made the President’s statement so damaging is that it allowed millions of Americans to dismiss a disaster in their minds because there were only a few deaths. Once dismissed, as the disaster in Puerto Rico worsened, few people gave it another thought. When something is dismissed, resurrecting it is hard.
This dismissal might have happened anyway, but it was certainly made easier by lazy comparison. The President, who brags daily about how much money he has (and many things besides), is very prone to comparing things and dismissing those that seem to him to come in second, but really, in this case he is simply an exemplar of American culture at large. In America, everything is a race, everything a contest. TV and movie award shows get higher ratings than the shows they honor, because no one wants to watch a TV show that isn’t the best. (Once the show gets wins the Best category, then people can be bothered to go back and watch it.)
A restaurant can’t be good, it has to be a four star. A book can’t be good, it has to be a prize winner. And from my own experience: A doctor can’t be good, he must be a to Top Doctor. The best in his field, or nobody.
On a number of occasions, while telling other people a personal story, I have been shut down, expected to give ground to someone who had it worse; or, if I told about something lucky that happened to me, I had to yield to a story that was luckier. It is bad enough when the person says, “Oh, you think that’s bad? Let me tell you what happened to me!” Even worse is when the person says, “You think that’s bad? I have a cousin who…” In such cases, you aren’t just competing with the other people present, you are competing with people not there who got the shaft worse than you did.
So if you happen to be in a disaster, remember that you have to go for it. You have to be the worst disaster, you have to be the most destitute, you have to lose the most neighbors to drowning. Otherwise, you are just second rate. And second rate misery loses out in the great competition that we call the American Way.
What is lost in all this is empathy. Pure, common empathy, and its noble cousin compassion. The ability to give other people the dignity of telling their own stories. It is, of course, horrible to know that 3,000 people died in Puerto Rico, but what is much worse is the thought that we would not have cared as much if it had not surpassed the Katrina total. As if that matters.
Everyone has misfortunes. Some are worse than others. But better or worse, every human being has the same dignity, the dignity of being heard, not in comparison to others but on his or her own terms. The misfortune of another is always worth paying attention to, whether it is worse than someone else’s suffering or not. It is the nature of human concern not to compare people and their suffering. All suffering has meaning, small or great, or else human beings have no intrinsic worth. This is what John Donne meant when he said, “any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
When I think of this foolish game of comparisons, I also think of what I consider to be one of great moments in literature, a scene from Shakespeare’s King Lear. By scene three of Act III, King Lear has lost everything; his children have abandoned him, friends have been tortured and imprisoned, and his kingdom has been taken away. He is turned loose from his castle by his own daughters to wander alone on the heath and die of exposure. His only companion is the Fool, his court jester. Standing on the heath, abandoned, unloved, ruined, and in agony, he nonetheless turns to the Fool, the only friend he has left, and says:
My wits begin to turn.
Come on, my boy: how dost, my boy? art cold?
I am cold myself. Where is this straw, my fellow?
The art of our necessities is strange,
That can make vile things precious. Come,
your hovel.
Poor fool and knave, I have one part in my heart
That's sorry yet for thee. (Act III, Scene 2)
Despite all he has suffered, Lear can still find a part of himself to be concerned for the welfare of his last friend.
Real human greatness is concern for another, no matter what your own plight. This isn’t a competition. We are all dignified human beings, and it makes all of us greater when we are concerned for one another.