An interesting article on an interesting observation: Americans go gangbusters to help in an emergency — throwing donations, giving blood, doing the heavy lifting to help people in crisis survive. Heroic stuff, absolutely necessary, highly laudable.
But when it comes to the proactive steps needed to keep emergencies from happening … welllllll, not so much. Regular donations to disaster relief organizations, vs one-off checks … encouraging zoning laws, rather than dealing with the floods or fires that result when they’re ignored … eating healthy, instead of just getting cardiac surgery when our arteries clog up … taking steps to help prevent homelessness, rather than dealing with the homeless when a winter cold snap threatens lives … maintaining bridges, as opposed to building new ones …
… we all love the beau geste, the heroic response, the one-off effort that takes care of the particular acute problem we face. That’s a lot more fun (or a lot less drudgery) than dealing with chronic early-stage problems that are preventable or can be managed or paid for (even if more efficiently) on a drudging, day-to-day basis.
I’ve seen this over and over in volunteer organizations: if there’s an emergency, a crisis, something huge, people step up to save the day. But try to get them to step up for just the normal ongoing grunt work? You can hear the crickets chirping.
I don’t know if it’s a particularly American quirk, or a human one. It’s not efficient or effective. But it’s how we do things.
How Americans View Natural Disasters
Stephanie Zvan introduced me to Minnesota activist Sigrid Ellis, who put out a series of tweets that are really spot-on. I’d never thought about this before, but she’s absolutely right. Americans love to help when disaster hits — and that’s great — but we don’t want to do the hard work to help in the …
Pretty on point.
It's a human characteristic. It simply has a very nurturing environment in the USA.
I think this is a human characteristics. You can see the apathy at normal times, and rising to the occasion in a crisis as an emergency response in many other countries too.