Demosophia: A World of Wind

September 23, 2005

A World of Wind

I'm working at a Red Cross call center and got a couple of calls today that I found upsetting. They struck me the same way Patrick McGoohan's character in The Prisoner must have felt when he drank a mug of ale and, just as he was draining the last few dregs, the words "You have been poisoned" appeared on the bottom of the tankard. The first of these incidents involved a call from a girl who said her brother had been dropped off in some Texas coastal city by the crew of the boat he had been a seaman on, and the people who were supposed to pick him up to evacuate him away from the dock didn't show. I spent about half an hour attempting to track down telephone numbers for state and private services in Texas who her brother might be able to contact to get a ride out of the city, but the problem was that she hadn't talked to him in well over an hour, and for all we knew he'd alreadly been evacuated. She said that she'd talked to the State Police who had refused to help. Anyway, it was clear that she wasn't satisfied with what I was able to do, so I asked her whether she expected the Red Cross to launch a helicopter to rescue her brother. This was my best imitation of the Jack Nicholson character in As Good As It Gets, so I expected at least a little break in the solemnity, but from her outraged response it was clear that I had inadverntently hit upon exactly what she expected. She called me every name she could think of and then suggested that I needed to think about what I'd have thought had it been one of my family who was stranded. Then she hung up before giving me time to say that my sister had already been through Rita.

Some seem to bear this seething resentment that every single one of us can't be rescued all the time. I suppose this Cindy Sheehan attitude is just human, but how am I supposed to cope? And there are lots of people who are genuinely surprised that anyone has bothered to lend them a hand at all, for they pretty much expect to be on their own. To them, the helping hand is a miracle. At most they expect help from people within arm's reach, and not from some hyper-empowered Nanny institution. I guess I don't understand why anyone would think that in the midst of the largest mass evacuation in US history the resources not only of the state, but of every public and private humanitarian organization, ought to be exhausted for the sake of reassuring one person that her sibling need not even make a pretense of finding his own way to shelter from the storm.

And I'm also fairly convinced that if I, or anyone else, had actually managed to mobilize the resources of some genuine heros playing the role of Bill Whittle's "sheep dogs," roaming the Gulf Coast willing to risk their lives to sweep down and pull her bother into the arms of safety, she'd have regarded the whole thing as routine.

This is a language I don't speak.

While I'm on the subject, there was a similar incident today where a young man called who spoke only Spanish. I got an AT&T translator on the line in a conference and after awhile it was clear that the caller was asking the Red Cross to somehow help him transcend the difficult logistical problem of evacuating Houston in the midst of a huge traffic jam of frightened people all headed in the same direction. In other words he wanted something like helicopter service. He kept asking me what he should do, no matter how many options I gave him. At one point I got exasperated and said in English "Go West young man!" That tickled the translator so much he couldn't stop laughing, but he refused to translate my advice. That refusal probably saved me from another "Jack Nicholson moment." What the man really wanted wasn't advice but to find out how far I'd be willing to go to alleviate him of any responsibility for helping himself.

So I chose to laugh... even though it'd have been just as easy (and probably more normal) to cry. If I could save all the brothers, and relieve all the anxious fears, I'd probably do it... fool that I am. But I'm not fool enough to think myself, or anyone else, a villain for falling short of that.