Not really. If you choose to live by a hillside, I don’t feel bad that when it rains heavily, your home gets filled with mud.
If you choose to live in New Orleans and to not evacuate when there’s a tornado warning, I don’t feel terrible that you got hurt. You should’ve gotten out.
Now you might argue, oh, I couldn’t get out because I was poor.
Well, you should’ve worked harder.
You might argue, I couldn’t get out because I was poor and I had no friends I could stay with.
Well, you should’ve been a better person so that you would have more friends. You shouldn’t have acted the fool and alienated yourself from your family and potential friends. You should’ve studied in school instead of smoking dope.
If you want to live in Malibu, I don’t feel bad that your home gets burned in fires.
If there are expensive medical treatments you, an able-bodied person, can’t afford, I don’t feel for you. You should’ve worked harder and smarter.
If you made smart responsible decisions with your life and then a quirk of fate hurts you, then I feel bad for you. If you get hit by a drunk driver or a non-preventable disease, I feel terrible for you.
Compassion by definition is limited. If you give everyone the same compassion, you give none of them compassion.
I am opposed to all government disaster relief except to save lives. I don’t think the government should pay people to rebuild and to compensate them for their losses in tornadoes and earthquakes and floods.
The Los Angeles Times reports:
Thunderstorms raked Laguna Canyon early Wednesday morning, hurling muddy water and debris down saturated hillsides, damaging dozens of homes and burying cars up to the windows in mud.
At 9:45 a.m., Orange County Fire Authority teams were preparing to cut their way into a shipping container that had become unmoored in floodwaters, floated several hundred yards down a creek and crashed into a bridge.
“There may be someone still in there,” said Capt. Jack Perisho as he considered the logistics of getting teams onto the toppled shipping container and then cutting their way into it with circular saws.
Perisho said the container was pushed downstream at about 3 a.m. Many canyon residents said that was when the brunt of a storm swept through the canyon. Some told of neighbors having to escape the mud flows by climbing out of windows.
