It's something of an equalizer, but if you look at the stats of who died in Hurricane Katrina, it was overwhelmingly poor people simply because they had less ability to leave. Nature doesn't care who it kills, but the people with the resources and the information are the ones who are going to be able to get out of its way, provided they have advance warning (and sometimes they're more likely to survive just because they have better protection). On the other hand, if an F5 tornado suddenly demolishes a major city, yeah, everyone's fucked. Have you read The Unthinkable (http://www.amazon.com/Unthinkable-Survives-When-Disaster-Strikes/dp/0307352897) by Amanda Ripley? It's really good, and one of the cases she talks about is a fire at a country club. The patrons did not react to save themselves, but had to wait for the staff to lead them to exits, and even afterwards they just stood around on the lawn while the staff kept going inside to save more people - because people default to their organizational roles during a crisis.
So I don't buy that everybody's equal after a disaster, which is the point of the first link in my post. Especially not an entire town. For one, you'd still have the original social structure at the time of the apocalypse. For two, power and grouping isn't something that I think goes out of fashion, so to speak, and neither does fear of the other. And of course it's all situational. If 10 people survive and only 1 is a woman, it sure sucks to be her, and while I don't think it would be as extreme if the odd person out was of a different class or race, birds of a feather still flock together.
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Date: 2011-04-19 03:44 pm (UTC)So I don't buy that everybody's equal after a disaster, which is the point of the first link in my post. Especially not an entire town. For one, you'd still have the original social structure at the time of the apocalypse. For two, power and grouping isn't something that I think goes out of fashion, so to speak, and neither does fear of the other. And of course it's all situational. If 10 people survive and only 1 is a woman, it sure sucks to be her, and while I don't think it would be as extreme if the odd person out was of a different class or race, birds of a feather still flock together.