You see you don't have to live like a refugee

To say that natural disasters bring out the best and the worst in people is a mawkish cliché, yet it’s true. Living through them makes you aware not only of the good and bad attitudes, but of the various ways in which people cope. I’m not talking about the paid liars or the people they protect, but about ordinary people: from the “let’s pretend everything is OK” delusionals to the heroes who simply do what they can do to help. Some of them get noticed, some don’t. The newspapers never mentioned my neighbor who loaded up a truck, rented a trailer, collected food and supplies and drove it all to Punta Gorda last year – just because it was the right thing to do. This is the only place you’ll hear about my friends Joe and Troy who went around town after Frances and Jeanne, repairing people’s roofs for free or about the restaurants that stayed open just to cook for the people in shelters and for the emergency workers. Some people remember the Amateur Radio community who slept in the back of trucks and on church pews and spent weeks providing emergency and humanitarian communications for free. Some remember the Red Cross volunteers who delivered meals day after day, who rescued sick people from a failing shelter during the eye of a Category 3 storm or the contractors who loaned generators to homes where there were sick people. To a large extent such people made up for FEMA having forsaken us.

Not all of the evacuees from the storm are in Houston, enjoying the condescension of the Texas Aristocracy. Here in Florida, where we know about hurricanes, some 300 have arrived to occupy 208 dormitory rooms at Palm Meadows Thoroughbred Training Center donated by Frank Stronach, chairman of Magna Entertainment, the Canadian company that owns the complex. The rooms will be available until he finishes building a trailer park for them in Northern Louisiana.

But for people like all of these, I would long ago have lost all faith in mankind.