Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Roaches.

I sat in on a graduate seminar at USM last night and listened to the students give presentations on the immediate responses to Katrina by various churches and other organizations around town. It was interesting and informative, and I'm sure I'll have a lot to say about it by the time I'm finished thinking it through. One quote that sticks out in my mind at the moment, though, is "After the storm, people were either roaches or angels." In other words, they were either scurrying around to see what they could get, or they were scurrying around to see what they could do to help. I'd say that's true in the first two weeks. Anybody who wasn't working to clean up and to help others was seen as part of the problem. And we definitely saw people taking advantage of those who came in with supplies and money. Once the power came back on, and people started going back to work, I'd say life sort of normalized to the point that there were still roaches and angels, but there was also a middle ground in which some people were just trying to live their lives, neither helping nor hurting anyone else in the process. At first, there was no normalcy, and there was no middle ground.

It reminds me of the saying, "Disaster doesn't bring out the best in people; it brings out the real." I can't remember who said that, but I wholeheartedly agree. Whatever your core character is will be the thing to come to the surface during times of crisis. You may be able to cover it up at other times, but everyone will know who you really are as soon as the world around you starts to go belly up.

The story they tell is that the day the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship decided they had done all they could for Hattiesburg and would do more good by moving their relief efforts elsewhere was the day a woman came to the church asking for Jello. She said she needed it because her fingernails had just not been the same since the storm.

Mike from UBC says that he knew needs had been met, and he was working for to serve people's greed the day he gave a case of bottled water to someone who asked if he could please make that Dasani. In his best deacon voice, he answered, "You'll take what I give you."

I'm sure we'd all prefer to be remembered as angels rather than roaches in other people's disaster tales, but once disaster strikes, we don't have time to become anything other than what we are already. If we want to be angels when it really counts, we have to practice being angels when we think it doesn't matter. We have to be as a matter of course what we want to be at our best.