The other day I was watching Man vs. Wild with Bear Grylls, and he was describing his survival trek through the wilderness as "self rescue" as he made his way to find civilization. Following that, I was watching a Hurricane Katrina show, where they were showing footage of people in the storm criticizing the government's inability to help them, and playing tapes of them calling 911 for help as their homes filled with water and they were trapped in their attics helplessly.

This really got me thinking. It's really a double edged sword that our society lives in such complete relative safety, and help is just a 9-1-1 away. People have lost not only the ability to help themselves, but even the mindset that there may be times when help might not be able to reach them. At some point along the way, there ceased just to be taking care of yourself and being "rescued", and there became being "rescued" primarily and we had to invent the term "self rescue" to describe that other thing you do to save yourself.

That's just amazing to me. We've managed to remove so much risk from people's lives, that they can't comprehend why people didn't come to help them as their house was drowned in two stories of rushing water. They complain that the power was off for weeks, somehow ignoring the fact that a gazillion gallons of water just sank half the city like Atlantis. I'm not talking about people just not being physically prepared for such situations, such as not having stored some bottles of water, but they just can't wrap their minds around the obvious cause and effect relationships, as if it happens by magic.

It's a testament to both our modern capabilities to tame the world, and the ever expanding gap between the self sufficiency skills of a typical modern person of the past half-century and pretty much every other person in the history of human beings.