The trend to publicly charge people involved in rescues and missing persons cases may contribute to the perception. I can remember the authorities charging the Runaway Bride for her search and rescue authorities charging at least one or two people lost in the mountains of Vermont and Colorado for their rescue costs.

The purpose of those charges was to dissuade others from false reports, "going missing", or from making dumb mistakes. Unfortunately, as often happens, the perception has changed "on the street" to make people think they'll get charged for any unusual services from the government.

My apologies, Paul, this is about Harold Bloom and his faux-elegant come-on line to Naomi Wolf ('you have the aura of election upon you'). Did you ever see this obsolete meaning of 'election' from the OED:

4. Astrol. The choice on astrological grounds of the fit time for undertaking any particular business; concr. a time so selected. Obs. exc. Hist.

barrett -- I kind of doubt that these kinds of stories are widely circulated, but I suppose it's possible. I do see the value of this kind of charge for rescue -- it's like the insurance deductible that helps prevent moral hazard. But the idea that it would apply here -- the idea that the government would leave you if you didn't have the money to pay -- is just horrifying.

JBM -- thanks for the comment, I actually hadn't seen that defintition. It's not actually that far off of the usual definition of election conceptually, but it does add some depth to the "faux-elegant come-on."

I've wondered a lot about the PTSD this situation will induce in some people and self-reliance in others. I wonder if it will psychologically/sociologically help people break out of the expectation that they will always be trodden upon. (Sorry, but psych and soc go together in my mind). What does David think?

Another thing I've thought about is the ongoing diaspora of former residents of NO. Potentially, this random redistribution may be one of the bigger problems. People may be slower to recover (socially, psychologically, economically, etc) from the individual and collective trauma of this event because their social support networks have been horribly disrupted. When I took medical sociology at IU, I remember studying social factors in refugee recovery from the 1970s flood of Buffalo Creek in West Virgina. Sociologists believe these people had major problems getting their lives back together because their social networks and sense of community was completely destroyed. (FEMA (?) at that time set up loads and loads trailers in various hollows and randomly distributed people among them). Interestingly, we are responding to a very similar event with a sociologically worse plan. I suspect that the refugees from the New Orleans flood may have an even more difficult time because many/most of the people who failed to evacuate arguably had a more tenous socio-economic situation.

I guess it will give sociologists something new to study.

Regarding the term election, I don't know the backstory but I'm assuming that someone like Bloom meant it in something more like the Presbyterian or Calvinist sense.

PG - Cool, thanks for that. The backstory is in these two posts, and I guess the comments have moved here because I closed those old threads. Interesting that the only other use of "aura of election" I was able to find through Google was from a religious scholar. Assuming Bloom actually said it, all these weighty religious meanings must have been in his mind.

It is not the first blog where I've seen such comments on this matter and I'm always a bit confused about that. I just wonder why people bother that much. Good post anyway...