The Myth of Choice_ Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits - Kent Greenfield [6]
Notice that our collective sympathy was not based on a notion that no choice had been made. Those who stayed behind were indeed making a choice, just as Henry Lamson chose to stay at his dangerous job. The Katrina victims were put in a tough position, and the alternatives were not good. But a choice it was.
Nevertheless, most Americans who watched their televisions in horror in the days after the hurricane seemed to understand the difference between choice and personal responsibility. Or maybe they realized that for a choice to be genuine and for personal responsibility to make sense, you have to have more information and more alternatives than most New Orleans residents in fact had.
There are lots of reasons why the personal responsibility mantra failed to carry the day. For example, the evacuation order came only twenty hours before the hurricane made landfall. Because of this, as many as one in four New Orleans residents did not hear about the order before the hurricane hit.8 A majority of those who stayed had no way to leave, and only 20 percent had relatives or friends they could move in with if they did. Most had no financial wherewithal to rent hotel rooms—only 28 percent had usable credit cards, and only 31 percent had a bank account. A significant percentage of those who stayed behind were caring for a disabled person. And, of course, they had been assured of the integrity of the levee system for years. It’s fair to say that many if not most of those who stayed to face Katrina were making a choice only in the most simplistic meaning of that term.
The interesting thing is that these facts did not have to be widely known for the victims to receive the benefit of the doubt. Most Americans seemed to recognize, in a simple but profound way, that the victims of the flood had had few real alternatives and should not be blamed for the “choices” they made. Polls taken a year after Katrina showed that Americans mostly blamed the government and government officials. Only 22 percent put primary blame on the residents.
Sometimes, we seem to excuse people from personal responsibility when they do make choices. About 16 months after Katrina, climbers on Oregon’s Mount Hood were stranded by a winter storm that blew in as they tried to scale the summit. CNN streamed live video from the mountain to homes across the nation. State and federal agencies, including the military, picked up the tab for the search. Maybe the climbers had no warning of the storm, but maybe they did. They almost certainly had more warning of the storm than Jane Costa had of Darren Lewis’s foul ball. And climbing such a mountain at any time of year, let alone in December, is a risky proposition. Nevertheless, the fact that they made a bad choice in deciding when and where to climb played no role in the media coverage. Understandably, we watched with dread instead of judgment, fearing the worst. In the end, one climber was found dead, and two others were still missing when the search was called off after two days, with another storm approaching. The news coverage was empathetic, mindful of the impacts of the tragedy on the climbers’ families. The climbers themselves were adventurers, admired for their bravery and spirit.
So let me make a weird comparison. Among the most despised individuals in America are fat people. According to studies, young children are more likely to describe overweight playmates as stupid, mean, or ugly. Parents provide less financial support for overweight children pursuing education after high school than for their non-obese siblings. People say that if given a choice between marrying an obese spouse and someone else, they’d rather marry an embezzler, a drug addict, a shoplifter, or a blind person. More parents would abort a fetus if they knew it would be destined to be obese than if they knew it was mentally retarded. One recent study revealed that someone standing