The novel, Blindness, depicts the adventures of people who are struck with sudden blindness. The government insists that the blind be put into isolation “for the good of the people.” The blind have a hard time adjusting to life in an old mental asylum. Their food is delivered by the military guarding the asylum and does not arrive regularly. A group of the blind came together, and begin to demand valuables from others in exchange for food. When there are, no more valuables the hoodlums demand women in exchange for food. The women comply and suffer from repeated sexual abuse. One of the women kills the hoodlum’s leader and the blind plan an attack on the remaining hoodlums. After a failed attack, one of the women lights the beds blocking the hoodlums’ ward on fire. The blind try to escape and they found the military had left the outside of the building. They were left abandoned, so they leave the building and a group of the blind begin to wonder the city. They find that the whole country has gone blind and is in chaos. People are looting stores and houses and electricity is non-existent.
After reading the section about people looting stores and houses, I thought about the state of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Similarly, people in New Orleans were looting stores and essentially began acting with no morals or ethics. People were killing others for no reason. They were acting like animals and had no shame for their actions. Society had essentially broken down and people’s actions reflected that. The doctor’s wife had found that society in their city had also broken down. People were going from store to store looking for anything they could use. People also were not willing to share or help others. The doctor’s wife found a supply of food and she decided to keeps its location to herself so if she needed more food she would know where to go. There was no running water or electricity, in New Orleans and the blind city. The doctor’s wife pointed out that people were so used to having modern conveniences that they did not know how to function without them. This is completely true today. Many people do not know how to do simple tasks because they were replaced with modern conveniences.
One question that I had from reading about society breaking and seeing it happen in New Orleans, is why when a disaster happens do people lose all their morals and begin to act like animals? I think that when things get so bad, people do not care what they do or how those actions make them seem. They only care about surviving and taking care of their family. When the hoodlums demanded the women in exchange for food, this was an action that they would not normally commit. They became desperate and did things they would not normally do. This makes one think what would you do in this type of situation. If a disaster struck your city, like Hurricane Katrina, would you loot stores to survive or would you stand by your moral principles? If you knew there would be no consequences for your actions, would you commit crimes? Would you be selfish or help others? Personally, I would rather be alive than dead with my morals.
2 comments:
As far as looting stores after Hurricane Katrina or even after everyone is struck by blindness, its almost ridiculous to do anything else. No one is running the stores anymore. Someone paid for the food to be there, but no one is going to be able to collect money for the food. People can sit around and starve to death while the food rots, but I hardly see that as being founded on moral principles. No one came to the aid of either set of people. Not enough food was being delivered, yet individuals still needed to eat. The preservation of one's life and the lives of one's family is very important. I think however, that there is a line between doing things to survive and doing things because you can. This line is crossed when you are doing things that cause undue harm to others and do not aid your survival. This includes the raping of the women. The thugs did not NEED to rape these women to survive, it just gave them pleasure to do so. In doing so they also took away the humanity and caused undue bodily and mental harm to the women.
I believe that there is not much point in being selfless if it means that you will soon die. I think you can do good on a larger scale if you stay alive first and give of what you can spare. Taking care of one's group is important to your own survival, as there is safety in numbers. If you give of all that you have and die, you are doing less good for others than you could if you stayed alive and took care of your group. If your group became well off enough to be able to help others, than the group can enlarge, and you are getting closer to something resembling order.
The only problem is that everytime you take food, you take away food that someone else could be eating. By hiding the food left in the store from the blind, the wife was allowing her group to eat while denying food for others. In order to assure the survival of herself and her group, this was necessary. She, presumably being the only person left who could see, was in a unique position to help people if she took care of herself and assured her own survival. In this way, her actions could be regarded as necessary for the greater good.
The Katrina episode was also overblown to a degree and is quite different in many respects. We could, as a society, sit in the comfort of our living rooms watching in awed curiosity/horror while eating our delivered pizza while the people of NO were cut off, not allowed to leave (think of the sherrif in gretna who actually fired on crowds trying to cross a bridge out of new orleans), had no resources, and the government was not providing them. It took a week for food to get into the city. A week. Lastly, there were under 10 deaths in the superdome -- most from lack of medice(s), old age, etc. There was one suicide. No mrders. For a group of tens of thousands trapped in one place with no "government" and no help or assistance, I'd say that is remarkable. The media, again, hyped and misrepresented the violence -- therefore the question is why? to what effect? Seattle Times wrote extensively on this -- and there are a number of academic articles that debunk many of the myths after Katrina.
In the novel, everyone was hit with the "disease". I wonder, though, those who could watch on the news those "runruly citizens" who went to the banks and demanded their money, or the chaos that surely followed in the stores also thought that morals and ethics were out the door.
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