21st century American hurricane fighters

Is it possible that Americans took the sting out of Rita with a collective force of will power? A few years ago Art Bell wanted to help out an area in Florida that was suffering from a severe drought and asked his listeners to contribute their thoughts and prayers at a specific time. They did and it rained much more than they even wanted it to. Art Bell is probably one of the few who could consciously pull something like this off. I'll bet there's greater potential in the leaderless unconscious.

What about Katrina's horrible destruction? I don't think the general population, like myself, had any notion of how bad that hurricane could be when we watched it on TV. Our collective will power, at best, consisted of sympathy for the victims as was evidenced by the money we sent in to charity. But we're not always at our best and I have to wonder if a lot of people, at least a lot of people like myself who were high and dry, watched this very natural disaster unfold with a considerable amount of wild primal interest in seeing how bad it could get. In effect Katrina was invited in to entertain us with her wet and windy dance.

Rita was different because now we've all been educated in the ways of seemingly uncontrollable hurricanes. It's not only bad for the people who have lost their homes and have been displaced, not to mention those who lost people they loved. It's also bad for those of us not in hurricane country who are going to watch a bundle of our money take a one way trip down south. And we don't like to see offshore drilling platforms shut down and refineries closed, leading to higher gas prices. All these things and more were being added to our collective unconscious as Category 5 Hurricane Rita did a wild and deadly dance out in the Gulf Of Mexico.

This time we were believers and we were scared. Is it possible that we arrogant, pompous, petty and bickering humans were able to unconsciously and spontaneously mobilize ourselves in a defensive manner to resist - if not rob - Rita of her power?