Zeitoun
I didn’t use WiFi for most of my Virgin America flight because of Dave Eggers’s excellent book Zeitoun. The author calls it “a nonfiction account a Syrian-American immigrant and his extraordinary experience during Hurricane Katrina”. If you haven’t read it yet, don’t let me spoil it for you with the rest of this post. Get a copy. It’s a page turner.
Abdulrahman Zeitoun not only survives but prospers as an immigrant entrepreneur and family man in America, and even as a survivor of Hurricane Katerina while canoeing around his flooded New Orleans neighborhood rescuing people. The book starts with an intimate portrait of the Zeitoun family and the tale of Abdulrahman’s survival of the flood. Eggers is a wonderful storyteller: he puts you in their living room. Then he breaks your heart by telling the tale of Zeitoun’s mistaken arrest and wrongful imprisonment for over a month. Zeitoun was not allowed a phone call or lawyer, so his family assumed he died in the flood. As we all know the system (the government, not just the levees) failed New Orleans. Zeitoun’s story offers a human scale to measure the massive effects of a system gone wrong.
One obvious lesson to take away is that it’s essential to set up a system properly and adjust it as situations change. But most of us aren’t in the position to do that. And even if we are, we can’t make a perfect system or change it fast enough.
What’s striking about the story is that all along the way, despite a horrible system, any official in the system with a shred of authority and courage to act on common sense could have righted many of the wrongs committed to Zeitoun. Eventually someone did, and all it took was a short phone call.
The effects of the system set up to bring law and order to New Orleans reminds me of a TED Talk by Barry Schwartz on our loss of wisdom. He tells stories of people blindly following the procedures of a system without ever thinking. Wisdom, Schwartz says, isn’t genius but the ability to think for oneself beyond the rules.
At the end of the book, there’s no one person to be enraged at. Eggers doesn’t identify a villain. Just a lot of people following the rules. One of the few heroic acts taken by someone in the system was that short phone call, which was of course against the rules.
