By this point we’ve all heard about the disaster that has struck Louisiana. Hurricane Katrina has caused millions of dollars worth of damage and has cost literally countless lives in the wake of its hundred mile-per-hour winds. While there are people who have put aside all other responsibilities in favor of helping in the rescue efforts there are still those who have taken a different approach to the crisis: greed.

Greed motivates most people in society; even the most self righteous person in the world has to look out for themselves from time to time. The true nature of a person can be seen in their actions during a time of crisis, a time such as now.

You’ve heard about it all over the news, looters, taking the panic and catastrophe in Louisiana and using it to pillage and plunder whatever they can get their hands on and still be able to carry away. All the while they are shooting or violently attacking whoever would try and stop them.

Something I can’t quite figure out is what motivates people, such as these, to commit such acts. For starters you have just barely survived what is being considered to be one of the biggest and deadliest storms ever recorded by human beings. Now you are stuck in a city with very little food, very little drinkable water, and worst of all no way out.

The first thing on the minds of these people should be to find safety. But instead they choose to find whatever shops and stores they can get into and proceed to loot and pilfer to their hearts content. Forgetting entirely about the fact that, once they’ve gotten away with their merchandise, they have nobody to sell it to except for starving, homeless people who are now forced to live in a mud hole that at one time had been their home.

All the while they find themselves having to fight off policemen, who shouldn’t even be wasting their time try to stop these people when they could be putting it to good use saving people who aren’t looking out entirely for themselves.

In the end the situation in Louisiana is a very serious one; the state of things that the hurricane has left us is bad enough and it shouldn’t have to be made worse by selfish, inconsiderate people who care only for themselves and their own well being. This world would be a far better place if we all just put aside our personal greed in times of crisis and focus on what has brought people together since before written history: the will to survive.