I realise I'm making a lot of assumptions about people who may be bad actors but I prefer to err on the side of optimism. That optimism about humanity was reinforced in Kaikoura when the whole community came together in the midst of crisis and when the Ngati Kuri invited stranded tourists and quake relief workers onto Takahanga Marae and gave them a place to sleep and fed them over the next seven days out of their own compromised supplies.
Few recent events have made me as proud to be a part of a country where the best instincts of people, reaching out to care for others, can find expression. In turn. I'm reasonably certain those tourists will be making our praises heard afar.
What was considerably less praiseworthy were those opportunistic looters who took advantage of the Mill family and three others in New Brighton who had evacuated their homes after tsunami warnings.
Among their swag was a Roger Pen, a device that enables a deaf person to hear better. These expensive devices must be specifically programmed to the individual's hearing aids, hence have no marketable value, making the act of stealing them, wanton and pointless.
Particularly in the face of community grief and shock at a natural disaster, these anti-social actions promote tragic consequence and evoke justifiable outrage. It's the same set of feelings of discouragement and anger at people who would vandalise a building here in Whanganui provided for emergencies, for the rescue of swimmers in hazard of their lives.
What those in South Island and here have done is a betrayal of all of us, of our beliefs in the possibility of our better selves, of our joining together when the crisis comes. It feels like treason.
And with that feeling comes the brief momentary identifying with those who call for harsh sentences, tough enduring punishments, vengeance ... Except ... except that vengeance and harshness won't undo the collective damage where restorative justice will.
To find these looters and these vandals requires that we act again as a community to appeal not directly to those criminals but to all about them who must know what they did, to bring them to light on behalf of the greater community. It's not dobbing in, but saving them from themselves.
In related fashion, are those small businesses at the point of extinction due to a natural disaster which, while itself not predictable, yet exists as definable risk.
Rather than depend on the chancy largesse of government, how much better prepared they'd be if - by virtue of a small annual contribution - they could create a national mutual insurance scheme that would accumulate sufficient capital and earnings to compensate them and their employees during a period in which they could not, for safety reasons, remain operational.
Large businesses would already self-insure by virtue of capitalisation, but the small ones are the actual employment engine of any economy.
In these times of crisis the sensible coming together of the community - as it did in Kaikoura - can avert the conversion of catastrophe to something worse, tragedy.
■Jay Kuten is an American-trained forensic psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand for the fly fishing. He spent 40 years comforting the afflicted and intends to spend the rest afflicting the comfortable.
