I love the Fred Rogers quote about looking for the helpers in the middle of a crisis. It’s comforting, grounding, and true. But growing up in hurricane territory taught me something else: in every disaster, there are also people who run toward the crisis for entirely different reasons.
Not everyone is running in to help.
Some are running in to make money.
Profiteering—especially price gouging—is as predictable in a natural disaster as power outages and long lines at the gas station. These individuals or businesses see emergency as opportunity, a chance to squeeze a windfall out of people who can least afford to lose anything.
Crisis Reveals What Was Already There
Disasters have a way of exposing the small choices we were already making long before the storm—or the virus—ever arrived.
If we’ve been choosing unselfishness in the everyday moments, a crisis tends to magnify that. And the same is true if we’ve been choosing selfishness. The often‑misattributed but well‑phrased line—usually linked to John Wooden but more accurately traced to Heywood Hale Broun—says:
“Sports don’t build character; they reveal it.”
The same principle applies here.
Most people believe they will rise heroically in a moment of great sacrifice. But if sacrificial choices are not already part of our ordinary life, we are unlikely to flip a switch when the stakes get high. And if our normal pattern is to choose ourselves first, that pattern usually shows up in the crisis as well.
COVID‑19 Exposed More Than a Virus
There were—and still are—plenty of people who consistently make selfish choices and who saw COVID‑19 as a new avenue to take advantage of others caught in circumstances they never asked for. Predictably, the ones hurt most tend to be those with the least margin, the fewest resources, and the smallest buffer for loss.
COVID‑19 didn’t create these patterns.
It simply revealed them.
What We Claim to Believe Is Being Tested
As a follower of Christ, I believe in a God who says:
- the first will be last and the last will be first
- His strength is made perfect in weakness
- He uses the foolish things of the world to shame the wise
A crisis exposes whether we actually believe these things—or whether they are just words we say when life is easy.
COVID‑19, like every disaster before it, is a revelation. It shows us who runs in to help, who runs in to profit, and what kind of people we have been becoming all along.