Ordinary heroes respond to the unprecedented flooding in Nashville that has escaped media and government attention (thanks to Lew Rockwell):

“First, at the height of the storm, a woman in the subdivision went into labor. A neighbor saw what was going on and tried to drive the woman and her husband to the hospital, but wound up driving in circles; there was absolutely no way out of our part of Bellevue.

They went back home and began sending e-mails and text messages on their phones to try and locate a doctor. A high-risk OB was found a few miles away- the trouble was, his neighborhood was separated from theirs by a vast expanse of floodwater.

Despite this, he waded through the waist-deep water to the other side (a feat in itself- people died in this flood attempting to do the very same thing), then hitched a ride to the woman’s house. There, he delivered the baby by flashlight, with help from a group of neighbors…..

That same day, a neighbor of some friends of ours in that subdivision had made a very difficult trip to Publix as the flood waters rose to get more formula for her baby. The baby had serious allergies to certain foods and needed a particular kind of formula, and in the panic and confusion of the day (the water was rising quickly in the parking lot outside Publix) and due to the fact that it was dark in Publix, the woman bought the wrong formula. When she got home, she gave it to her child, who went into anaphylactic shock.

Can you even imagine the horror she must have felt that moment?

She ran outside, shouting for help, and my friends came out to help her. A pediatric resident in the neighborhood had just managed to get home from the hospital, saw what was happening down the street, and came over. Another neighbor brought out a breathing machine she had on hand for her asthmatic child, and our friends hooked it up to an extension cord, powered by an outlet they had bought that operated with a car’s power. They got the breathing machine going, the resident got on the one working cell phone on the street with his attending, and together, using medication various ones of them had on hand, they revived the child and essentially saved his life……..

Large sections of Nashville now look like a war zone, but to me, it’s never been more beautiful here and I’ve never been more proud to call this place home.”

I hope the blogosphere won’t react with comments about what the residents failed to do that exacerbated this catastrophe, as they did in the aftermath of Haiti. I remember then that I read a lot of commentary that amounted to “well, if only they weren’t poor and backward, they’d have survived because the buildings would have been built better”  —  with all the cultural freight that carries.

Tennessee is a good example of how community rescue efforts surpass anything the state can do for citizens. If that’s the case with humanitarian crises, which are usually time-sensitive and unanticipated, then it seems logical that other kinds of problems – resource shortages, distribution questions, or land disputes, for instance – can also be dealt with better by cooperative social efforts rather than top-down command and control schemes.