When you’re a reporter, you get to see the good and bad in human nature.

Over the years, I’ve seen the worst in mankind.

I’ve seen people do things and act in ways that can almost shatter my faith in human nature. And at the same time, I’ve seen things that restore my faith in mankind and literally bring tears to my eyes.

Those tears came close to coming this past week as I watched my hometown and the areas I grew up around go under water as deluge after deluge hit Louisiana from Alexandria to the extreme areas of South Louisiana.

Watching people deal with the high water and having to leave their homes to the mercy of the flooding brought back memories not only of my own experience with Hurricane Katrina and the 2011 spring Mississippi River flood, but the first flood I covered in Baker, La., a small town of then 12,000 people north of Baton Rouge, where I lived for 10 years before leaving the state.

I remember that event 35 years ago not because I floated in a boat over streets that the day before I drove over in my truck, but because I saw neighbor helping neighbor evacuate or move belongings to higher ground.

We in the South are a strange breed. We fight, we argue, we take sides on issues and get involved in arguments on everything from how to cook a hamburger to whose school has the best football team. But when the chips are down, when disaster strikes, we all ban together to help each other out, whether we know the other person or not, or whether we’ve held a 20-year grudge against them.

People up north may scream and yell for the government to help them, but in the South, we don’t wait for FEMA; we don’t wait for the president; we roll up our sleeves and go to work.

I saw that in Baker in 1981, after hurricanes Georges and Katrina on the coast, and I saw it as I looked at pictures and watched video from Baton Rouge, Denham Springs, Ascension Parish and other areas of South Louisiana where people not only from those areas but from neighboring cities and parishes brought their boats to pull people from their front porches and the roofs of their homes.

They probably didn’t know the folks they were helping, and they probably didn’t care. All they knew was people were in trouble, needed help, and they were able to provide it.

I’m always amazed at the way people respond when their neighbors are in trouble, and this time, because I was a true spectator and not covering the disaster, I had a better appreciation of the efforts of those volunteers.

It made me proud to say I’m from Louisiana, and proud to be from the South.

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John Surratt is a staff reporter for The Vicksburg Post. You can reach him by emailing john.surratt@vicksburgpost.com.