- 1
- 2
- 3
They failed the test
by Gayle Atteberry
“A complete breakdown of society”, is how I would describe conditions inside New Orleans’s Memorial Hospital during the days following hurricane Katrina. And when society breaks down, the weak die.
I just finished reading Five Days at Memorial by Pulitzer Prize winner Sheri Fink, a hair-raising true story of what went on inside Memorial Hospital while it was stranded in flooding waters.
From my perspective, people completely lost their senses, reverting to their most base human nature. Without electricity things were difficult. However one whole wing of the hospital still had power, a fact completely ignored by the staff who were in the dark, and jealously guarded by the staff who were in the light.
In the end, 45 people were dead, including a healthy paraplegic, the majority having been euthanized by a handful of medical personnel.
The book is a fascinating, while at the same time terrifying, study on human nature. Deep-rooted moral values are revealed in times of emergencies, as w ho we really are is tested. Silence is also deadly, as many who suspected what was happening preferred to turn their backs. “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil,” said Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German pastor who stood up against Hitler and his anti-Jewish actions. “God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”
The author not only detailed the five-day events during the storm, but also followed events afterwards. One doctor was arrested, but public outcry was unanimously in her favor. “She was doing the best she could”, “You have no idea of how bad conditions were”, were two resounding phrases given in her defense.
Interestingly, just last week I was discussing this book with a friend who lives in New Orleans and was acquainted with the uproar over the events at the hospital. She too quickly came to the defense of the doctor. “You just don’t know how bad it was during that time” she said, reiterating one of the defense attorney’s plea for the doctor on trail.
So many observations can be made over this tragedy:
- The water-siege of the hospital was only FIVE DAYS. They had plenty of food and water. Any group of people should be able to withstand five days of hardship without resorting to killing the weak. How many hundreds, if not thousands of horrific events have happened through history far worse, and for far lengthier time, where humans have banded together heroically and made it through the event?
- Morale is everything. It only takes a few to keep the light of hope burning. In another New Orleans hospital enduring the same hardship, only three patients died of natural deaths. Staff in the hospital sang songs, encouraging one another and kept everyone “hanging on”.
- Emergencies are when your Christian moral values MUST come to the rescue. It would have only taken two or three brave people to have spoken up and changed the course of Memorial’s history.
- Don’t believe everything you read. The defense lawyer was extremely effective in guiding public opinion. Politics and emotion ran the course of events.
- DO NOT RELY on emotions. Both in the hospital and in events following, emotions controlled. Our society has increasingly left its ties with God’s moral laws, and runs almost solely on emotions. A society run by emotions is a very dangerous one. Everyone is guilty of relying on emotions in some degree, and it is important that we search for solid moral principles now so we are ready when we are tested.
I will not tell you the end of the book. You must read it and draw your own conclusions about the horrors of this tragic episode.
