Personal Survival

The lake formerly known as New Orleans turns out to be an equal opportunity finger pointer. As near as I can tell, New Orleans’ demise represents a tragic, catastrophic failure of not only governmental institutions — be them Federal, state or city — but in some cases, communal failures as well. And we shouldn’t be smug and think communal failure is limited to New Orleans. It could happen anywhere.

We can all be as dissatisfied as we like with the institutions that fail us. But if the buck stops at the President’s desk on one end of the accountability scale, surely it must start in our own homes and communities on the other end. We’re accountable too. We’re in charge of our immediate safety and not leaving it entirely to institutions. All of us are responsible.

Ask yourself if you are prepared for a disaster right now. Do you have enough water or calories stored in your basement to survive a calamity? Most of us don’t. We figure that we’ll get rescued by one of those institutions we feel so bitter towards. I’ve been guilty of this, until a few weeks ago, when all the nuclear terror stories motivated me to take some basic precautions.

Both political parties have spent years and billions of dollars on institutional solutions for citizen survival in catastrophic circumstances. Surely, things can be vastly improved on that scale, and responsibility lies at the feet of our public institutions. But we should also assume some accountability, too. Our basic instinct for survival is not an institutional matter. It’s personal. And it’s communal. In that respect, we’re in charge. It’s up to us, whether we believe it or not.

[via Donklephant]