Tragedy and Detachment

Usually when a natural disaster hits, I find myself effectively intellectualizing the tragedy, focusing on big-picture issues that call for problem-solving or logical analysis, rather than the person-by-person anguish that has unfolded.  So when the tsunami hit in December, I focused on the theological implications, which make for fantastic and important debate, but can sometimes distance us from the ground-level reality.  That changed a couple of weeks later when we learned that a close friend of my wife's from college had been swept away by the tsunami in Thailand.  The debate suddenly became less vital to me. 

There was no chance of intellectualizing Katrina.  As a graduate of the University of New Orleans, for four years I lived steps away from Lake Pontchartrain, and still have many good friends in the city.  So the impact of Katrina, for me, is not captured by the panoramic scenes of flooding, the gambling barges tossed onto buildings in Mississippi, the skyrocketing gas prices, or even the law students with their futures in limbo.  I think of my friends Chuck and Becky, of their beautiful but now uninhabitable home near the lake, and of the fear and confusion faced by their young kids.  I also think of their deep family roots in New Orleans, and of sunny February mornings during college standing in the front yard of Becky's childhood home as the Mardi Gras parades went by, a home that is now almost certainly underwater.

I might be speaking for myself (but I doubt it) when I confess that lawyers, and especially law professors, are very adept at using our minds to detach ourselves from suffering.  Indeed, I catch myself unconsciously teaching my Torts students to do the same thing as I gloss over (or worse yet, make a joke of) the horrific suffering of plaintiffs that fills our casebook, recasting it without even skipping a beat as a problem to be solved through the application of legal reasoning.  I hope that I can teach myself, as well as my students, to make sure that I don't even think about solving someone's problems until I've come alongside and mourned their loss.

Rob