Post #3344102

"The sociologist E.L. Quarantelli spent decades studying disasters and came to a conclusion that surprised many people: panic and antisocial behavior are the exception, not the rule. Communities typically show increases in prosocial behavior: strangers help each other, crime rates generally fall, and people who were barely acquaintances briefly become something like a community. Rebecca Solnit documented this pattern across a century of catastrophes. Her case studies, including the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the 1917 Halifax explosion, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, the September 11 attacks in New York, and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, illustrate Quarantelli’s findings. Disasters reveal a capacity for mutual aid that is usually suppressed by the atomization of modern consumer society. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 produced the most extensively documented divergence between media narrative and documented reality in modern history. In the days after the storm, major news organizations reported roving gangs in the Superdome, mass rape, and snipers firing at rescue helicopters. Subsequent investigation found that the reported gang violence did not happen, the murder rate in the city did not spike, and most of the “looting” was people taking food and water to survive." https://third-bit.com/2026/06/17/how-change/