Among many other lessons, Hurricane Katrina provides yet another example of how quickly stories can mutate in the retelling, especially in stressful situations. That’s totally understandable. People under stress can imagine, and say, a lot of things that they believe to be 100% correct. But oftentimes, things later turn out to be different.
For example, we read in today’s paper that the stories of savagery in the New Orleans Superdome may not have been completely accurate. (I’ve seen a number of those stories in emails circulated by friends, with some of the emails purporting to come from people who supposedly got the information from eyewitnesses.) In an Associated Press piece published in today’s Houston Chronicle, Michelle Roberts reports:
NEW ORLEANS – On Sept. 1, with desperate Hurricane Katrina evacuees crammed into the convention center, Police Chief Eddie Compass reported: "We have individuals who are getting raped; we have individuals who are getting beaten."
Five days later, Mayor C. Ray Nagin told Oprah Winfrey: "They have people standing out there, have been in that frickin’ Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people."
The ugliest reports — children with slit throats, women dragged off and raped, corpses piling up in the basement — soon became a searing image of post-Katrina New Orleans.
The stories were told by residents trapped inside the Superdome and convention center and were repeated by public officials. Many news organizations carried the witness accounts and official pronouncements and in some cases later repeated the claims as fact, without attribution.
But now, a month after the chaos subsided, police are re-examining the reports and finding that many of them have little or no basis in fact.
They have no official reports of rape and no eyewitnesses to sexual assault. The state Department of Health and Hospitals counted 10 dead at the Superdome and four at the convention center. Only two of those are thought to have been slain.
One of those victims — found at the Superdome — appears to have been killed elsewhere before being brought to the stadium, said Bob Johannessen, the agency spokesman.
"It was a chaotic time for the city. Now that we’ve had a chance to reflect back on that situation, we’re able to say right now that things were not the way they appeared," said police Capt. Marlon Defillo.
* * *
A week after the floodwaters poured into the city, the Times-Picayune of New Orleans quoted an Arkansas National Guardsman as saying that soldiers had discovered 30 to 40 bodies inside a freezer in the convention center’s food area. Guardsman Mikel Brooks told the newspaper that some of the dead appeared to have met violent ends, including "a 7-year-old with her throat cut."
When the convention center was swept, however, no such pile of bodies was found.
* * *
Lt. Col. John Edwards, the staff judge advocate for the 39th Infantry Brigade of the Arkansas National Guard, said Tuesday that Brooks told the Times-Picayune reporter only that he had heard rumors of bodies in the freezer, not that he had actually seen them.
"We have never found anybody who has any first-hand knowledge of dozens of bodies in the refrigerator," Edwards said. He said Brooks was unavailable for comment.
This is a familiar tale, often manifested in urban legends. We all hear things that “sound right,” but then later, they’ll turn out to be not quite the way they sounded.
The Dangers of Hearsay
Hearsay of this kind can be a Very Bad Thing when people base their beliefs, their worldviews, on stories they hear, and then make bad decisions on the basis of those beliefs. For example, in the wake of Katrina, some racists are jumping on the stories of Superdome savagery to justify their decisions to treat blacks as inferiors. (When I heard those stories on the news and read them in emails, I said to my wife that I was afraid this could be a major setback to race relations.)
Fortunately, most people are more careful than that. When making decisions, especially decisions that affect other people, most folks usually try to get their facts straight. That’s why, for example, the legal system has traditionally been exceedingly cautious about admitting hearsay stories into evidence.
When we make religious decisions that affect other people’s lives, we need to be similarly cautious. If we’re going to decide questions of religion and morality on the basis that Event X happened, or that Person A made Statement B, we need to try very hard to get the facts straight about the event / person / statement. We also need to be careful about making grand pronouncements when we don’t really have enough supporting evidence to warrant doing so.
In particular, we shouldn’t ignore the phenomenon of story mutation, which is endemic in human existence — and which we have no good reason to think was any different in biblical times.
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