The headline in the Anchorage newspaper read, “In Haines, Divisions Recede as Community Members Rally to Help after Landslides and Flooding.”
The story remained on the paper’s website for weeks, proving it was a popular one, generating clicks.
It’s a feel-good story, the kind people like to read about folks setting aside differences to help each other during a catastrophe. But it wasn’t particularly newsworthy; people everywhere in the world help each other during crises. It’s human nature, and the more innocent the victims, the bigger the help.
A little blonde girl goes missing and the U.S. Cavalry turns out.
Haines folks lend a hand to neighbors all the time, shown by our unending calendar of fund-raisers for victims of cancer, car accidents, house fires, and bug bites. There was once a public appeal to help send teen-agers from here to Australia to go camping.
The real question is whether December’s storm will make us any more neighborly to one another in our public affairs, and the answer is no. But that’s not to say the storm won’t have benefits.
A large and underappreciated one is that some people here met each other.
I was sitting at a Haines Chamber of Commerce event a few decades back and Vivian Menaker turned to me and asked me who was speaking. Mike Ward, who owned half the stores in town, was at the podium. How could Vivian Menaker, wife of our longtime newspaper publisher, not know Mike Ward?
The truth is that we know each other’s names but we don’t mix much. People who attend classical music performances at the Chilkat Center don’t eat at the American Legion burger feed on Fridays and vice versa. That’s okay. We’re all different.
But if the burger eaters and the classical listeners don’t get to know each other somewhere – during a school event, or in church, or at a little league game – they may not show much respect when they meet at city hall on the opposite sides of a political row. We fear and suspect people we don’t know. That’s human nature. Sociologists proved it long ago, studying real people.
The flip side of that equation is that we’re charitable to folks we know or grew up with, even if we don’t particularly like them. So meeting your neighbor is good even if it takes a disaster to make it happen.
Another upside is we all got served a deserved piece of humble pie. We tend to regard our town as a refuge, a place safe from the hazards of the Lower 48, and hold faith that even natural disasters can be held off with enough reinforced concrete and five-gallon buckets. As the saying goes, “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.”
But when mountains are falling down around you, being ready gets you only so far. Unprecedented landslides, tornadoes, tsunamis, flood, drought and fire don’t happen on a schedule and don’t stop at the edges of nice neighborhoods.
That all humans sooner or later cling to the edge of the earth and beg for its mercy gives our species a bit of humility, maybe enough to one day save us from our own self-destruction. So that’s a positive.
As for ending “divisiveness,” that’s a pipedream in a town with too many rednecks, hippies, yogis and Bible-thumpers and not enough clean-shaven civil servants. Civility should be the goal. Former resident and rhetorician Dan Henry talked up civility for years without making much progress.
My guess is that some people think civility is good, an equal number think it’s wimpy and the rest aren’t sure they know what that word means.