KEY POINTS:
Correspondence columns can be a good balance to unalloyed sympathy in the news. The letters in this paper on Wednesday were an almost complete compassion-free zone.
The first held that a man who damaged his eyes wearing somebody else's novelty contact lens was a "victim" of nothing but his own folly. The next, noting the man had received a transplanted cornea and failed to follow the surgeon's instructions, said the only "heartbreaking" thing about the tale was that two donated corneas had been wasted.
The third broadened the point somewhat. "Why is the public forced to pay for the stupidity of others. The Herald has reported that various parties are looking at banning both party pills and novelty contact lenses, yet every single incident has been a result of blatant misuse."
The theme continued on the subject of the High Court judgment that has made councils liable for compensating owners of leaky homes. One writer said, "people who chose to have a pseudo-Mediterranean style, flat roofed, no eaves, no flashings" home had themselves to blame.
"If I make a mistake," declared the next, "I am responsible for it and pay for it. Other people's mistakes are not my responsibility and should not be paid for by me, such as in the leaky homes problem, and I as a ratepayer object to it."
We are a sympathetic society on the whole, and need to consider sometimes that hard luck is not automatically in need of a social solution. Leaky homes is an interesting case. The blame lies plainly in national building advice, but the most practical solution is probably different in each case and best left to homeowners.
It would be different if repairs were not sensible unless they were financed collectively. Last month I saw a city of waterlogged homes desperately in need of a social rescue.
Downtown New Orleans today is a place of office towers and boulevards built for twice the number of strollers on its streets. The city's services are running on half-staff. The best restaurants in the French Quarter are seldom fully booked. The live music bars on Bourbon St send out touts to pull in tourists.
The city has had more than 18 months to recover from Hurricane Katrina, but outside the central city and the adjacent French Quarter, both mercifully on higher ground, are vast suburbs of abandoned homes.
The houses still look like flooded buildings do when they dry out. The high water mark remains, a dirty stain up to a line along the windowsills in many cases, much higher than others. Windows are broken, doors left open to empty interiors where water-blown jib and rotting carpets can almost be smelled from the street.
Many have a standard white caravan parked alongside with power leads running into the house. These were supplied by the Federal Emergency Management Agency soon after the disaster and those home-owners who have returned still live in them.
The city lies below the water level of the Mississippi River on one side and a wide shallow lake on the other. Full 80 per cent of the urban area was drowned when the levees that line the riverbank, the lakefront and canals between, failed in four places.
The breaches, now under repair, look cruelly small beside the vast area the water ruined. By and large the levees held and they think they know why the failures occurred. The steel reinforcing did not go deep enough in a few places and the force of the water stirred up by the storm undermined the banks at those points.
There's much blame and recriminations being flung about, mainly at the Army Corps of Engineers that built the levees in the 19th century and apparently remain responsible for the security of the entire Mississippi floodplain.
But the levees have worked for centuries and, with improvements, they will work for centuries more. New Orleans' problem now is not physical, it is social.
After 18 months only half the population that fled the city as the hurricane approached, have returned. Many will have found new jobs, schools, accommodation in other parts of the United States. But lack of people is not the main problem, nor is it lack of money. There are the usual grumbles about insurance companies and delays in federal funds, but it is not finance most people lack, it is collective confidence.
Of those pre-Katrina residents who have returned, too few are refurbishing their homes. The rest are still living in their FEMA trailers tossing up whether refurbishment would be worthwhile.
My tour guide was one of them. It is not that people like him do not want to do up their house, he said, they just do not want to be first.
They need to know how many others in their neighbourhood will invest money in these devastated wastes. Who wants to own the only restored home in a derelict row?
You can see the problem. Individual effort cannot solve it. Some sort of social device will be needed to induce a critical mass of those trailer dwellers to do what is plainly in their individual and collective interest.
They own property in one of the world's finest cities and want to go on living there, but they might lose it for good if they do not find the means of organising a concerted effort.
In similar circumstances I think this country would pull together and pull through.
