#2126: Re: #2112: RE: #2093: Are There Any ATM's? Laleau comments

[Robert Corbett <bcorbett@netcom.com>]

From:NLaleau@aol.com

Dear Karen --

Something struck me as I read your post... you know how Americans are always 
saying how wonderful people were to each other during the "fire, earthquake, 
flood, blizzard, blackout, subway shutdown, etc., etc." [substitute your own 
industrialized country type of disaster...]?  Well, that's what living in 
Haiti is ALWAYS like -- and if you're going to survive, you have to depend on 
others!

I lived in Berkeley California during the earthquake in 1991, was it? and 
during the Berkeley/Oakland Hills Fire a year or so before or after it, and 
that's all you heard -- "how good people were to each other."  I kept asking 
myself why it took a disaster for people to come out of their little nuclear 
cubicles to talk to each other... I was out in the streets talking with my 
neighbors while people were pouring out of the hills with their TVs strapped 
on their cars in some cases, or very nervous dogs pacing around them in 
others... 

It does strike me that there could be a happy medium -- if you added the per 
capita incomes and productivity etc., of the US and Haiti and divided them by 
two, perhaps the people would all turn out happier... the USians perhaps more 
interdependent, and Haitians perhaps less forcibly dependent... 

Nancy Laleau