Pete McMartin: There is nothing wrong with being prepared for disaster or wanting to protect oneself and one’s family from harm. But ...

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The day was warm, the sky, cloudless. The neighbourhood was blissfully quiet, and the dog and I had the street to ourselves. The apocalypse seemed a remote possibility.

And yet: A neighbour was in her front yard, and in the course of our short conversation, she said she was buying a trailer and stocking it full of emergency supplies. She said she wanted to be prepared for any catastrophe that might visit the neighbourhood — earthquake, flood, fire, plague.

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“After all,” she said, “it’s every man for himself.”

I blinked mentally at the coldness of her reasoning, but given the state of the world, I wasn’t about to say she was entirely wrong either.

But then, further down the street, I thought:

“Wait, is it every man for himself?”

I worked over 40 years as a journalist, and wrote about many people who found themselves in dire circumstances, and in every case I witnessed exactly the opposite — that it wasn’t every man for himself and never had been, that the people I saw and wrote about invariably felt compelled to rush in to help those in need, even at the peril of their own lives. Often those people rushing in to help were living through the same dire circumstances as those they were helping.

I saw it everywhere — in towns devastated by forest fires, in horrendous car accidents, on........

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