From the Editor: When the Heavens Stop the Rain

There are some things I never thought I would see in my lifetime: spaceships going faster than the speed of light; dinosaurs returning to rule the earth; thousands of Americans suffering—and many dying—from hunger, thirst, and lack of medical care while waiting days to be rescued from a natural disaster.

I am still wondering about hyperlight travel and Tyrannosaurus rex.

At some point right after hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, Terry Ebbert, chief of homeland security for New Orleans, was quoted as saying about residents who had failed to evacuate the city and died, “That’s a hard way to learn a lesson.”

I have to say that, for just a moment or two, something in me wanted to agree. It’s the same something that makes me holler at movies, “Don’t go in there, stupid!” just before the leading lady ends up with a vampire latched onto her neck; that makes me think, well, I don’t smoke/work with asbestos/eat fried foods when someone I know gets a terrible disease; that wonders why on earth somebody would stay in a city below sea level when a giant storm is coming. I’m not proud of it.

I think, though, that it is not necessarily cold-heartedness that makes us want to shift blame to people when something bad happens to them; it is, rather, human nature, a reflexive need to stave off creeping horror on our own account. They did something to make the bad thing happen; we wouldn’t do that thing; therefore, nothing bad is going to happen to us. We wouldn’t have gone in the dark room; we wouldn’t have been drained of our blood. We wouldn’t have gone to a tanning salon; we wouldn’t have ended up with melanoma. We wouldn’t have stayed behind; we wouldn’t have drowned.

There are a couple of things wrong with that line of thinking. First, in our desperation to halt our freefall through the randomness of existence and take control of our fates, we forget that sometimes our fates may not be within our control. It might make us feel better to think that, of course, we would have evacuated our homes when we were told to and not been trapped when the flood came. But according to a remarkable survey conducted by the Washington Post, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and the Harvard School of Public Health of people displaced by Katrina, 25 percent said they did not hear the order to evacuate, 32 percent of those who heard the order said they did not receive clear information about how to evacuate, and 42 percent of those who did not evacuate said they had no way to leave. In light of these data, the statement by Ebbert comes across as ignorant or callous, or both—and so do I, for finding common ground, however briefly, with him.

The other problem is that this self-protective logic forces us to think of the world in terms of “us” and “them”—a tendency that is only reinforced when we see crowds of victims who are of a different economic class or a different race than most of us. It creates a distance among groups in our society that makes of our compassion for others a glibly invoked ideal instead of the urgent call to action that is needed to prevent, or at least mitigate, unspeakable tragedies like what happened in New Orleans. It makes us indifferent, or at least ineffectual in responding, to the injustices that take place in this country and the rest of the world every day.

Several articles in this month’s issue of Public Opinion Pros bear on some aspect of the separations among us. An editorial by Darren W. Davis confronts head-on the question of race and the response to hurricane Katrina, and the challenge it presents to pollsters. Another op-ed by Patrick J. Egan and Kenneth Sherrill speaks of how gays and lesbians might explain to uncomprehending straights what denial of marriage means to them. And our lead feature, “The Myth of the Disengaged American,” by Russell J. Dalton, marks the beginning of an ongoing relationship between POP and the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) that will produce a feature article approximately once every six months, exploring differences and similarities among democracies throughout the world. This first offering is accompanied by a From the Field article by W. Phillips Shively that introduces the CSES project and explains how it is done.

In other articles, Mark Baldassare assesses the prospects for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s political agenda in an upcoming special election in the wake of the governor’s declining approval ratings, Larry Hugick and Stacy DiAngelo conclude their series on weighting preelection polls by party ID, and our In Print department introduces another new feature, Public Opinion Classics, with an excerpt from Jean Converse's Survey Research in the United States: Roots and Emergence 1890-1960.

In the aftermath of unprecedented national calamity, it is still easy for those of us who feel helpless in the face of such suffering to turn away from it and avoid the discomfort of our helplessness. Too often lately, I find myself feeling like some latter-day Nero, fiddling with a magazine while New Orleans drowns. I would like to think, though, that in its own small way, the light aimed by the articles in Public Opinion Pros, and by polling research in general, into the public mind can help us overcome the willful blindness that keeps us from finding each other in the dark.

Someday, I hope, “they” will become “us.” Someday, I hope, we will remove the armor that keeps us apart from others even as it protects us from our own fears, and pay proper heed to the disadvantaged, the dispossessed, the different; the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free; the meek, the persecuted, the poor in spirit. Someday we will address the misfortunes of other people as though they were our own, without regard to who they are, or who they love, or what god they worship (or not), or how much money they have, instead of finding reasons to separate ourselves from them.

Someday, perhaps, we will make the nobler part of human nature overcome our fearful selves, and make the world, finally, a better place. I don’t expect it will happen in my lifetime.