With self publishing ease reality has become the new fiction. Even a late arriving schlub who finds his wife and mother in law stranded in the upper story of the house becomes an internet "super hero" when he helps them leave the partly submerged structure. Consider it a dramatization unless they ask for $, then consider it Welches con-man like fraud.

genop? Remember to take your snark meds EVERY day!

God, no kidding! Whatever the extent of the man's heroics, he found his wife and mother in what is acknowledged chaos, and still seeks to help others. Genop makes it sound like a walk in the park. Ha!

I wonder, even if the details are not true, that this might be a cultural story, to reflect the resilience of residents of Japan continuing to look for family members and others. My question is what stories might be written about US residents when a disaster strikes? Katrina and New Orleans certainly had their horrors. Will we act with such persistance?

It's only the out-of-the-ordinary actions that make news coverage after disasters such as Japan experienced, of course. But I'm convinced that for every Hideaki Akaiwa out there, there are hundreds of ordinary people, doing ordinary unselfish things to help others, that can do the most to pull a nation back up to its feet.

The last area-wide emergency was probably the February 1996 flooding. Our government providers were of course overwhelmed, and when it came to constructing an emergency seawall at Waterfront Park to back up the existing wall there if it was breached, they got hundreds of citizen volunteers in a few hours, and just got it done.

And our emergency planners don't seem to really encourage this, or take it into account. In contrast, Seattle has taken one aspect of emergency response - CPR - and equipped 60% of its citizens over age 12 with CPR training. Studies there have documented "consistent survival rate of over 25% when witnessed VF arrest is combined with bystander CPR".

Imagine if this concept were extended to training for basic first aid, building emergency shelters, getting a clean water supply, setting up an emergency food and medical supply distribution network, etc.

Unfortunately, our leaders are not so visionary.