weathering the storms

It's been just over a week here in St. Louis since we experienced a wacky week of weather. We had high temps over 100 for a couple days with heat indices of 110+. In the midst of it all, we had two storms within 36-48 hours that put more than 500,000 in the dark. The amazing thing was that as the story was covered in the media, there were two, very different ways the story was covered. The first was how people banded together and helped each other out while they experienced long periods of power outages (actually, a few thousand are still out 9 days later). The other angle that most of the media took to quickly was how the electric company had failed the public by not getting the power restored more quickly. It has gone to the extent that now, the Missouri Public Service Commission has initiated an investigation.
Now, granted, I am speaking from the perspective of someone who experienced no power loss. The only way the whole situation affected me was that the power at my office went out and we had to leave work at noon last Friday (Gee, there's experiencing natural disaster!). I just find it very annoying that we, as a society, always need to find someone else to blame. I understand that 9-10 days without electricity would be incredibly frustrating, but why do we need to find someone else to blame? Why can't people accept that from time to time, things are going to happen that are beyond anyone's control? Why can't people simply accept the situation as it happens, WITHOUT casting stones on other people? The victim mentality of our society is very frustrating.
Even if we were to find out that somehow, the power company was slow in their response, what is that going to do? That fact isn't going to bring back all the spoiled food and missed appointments. It's simply going to offer people the ability to complain harder the next time their power goes out.
In my view, this is similar, on a much smaller scale, to the response that so many people had after Katrina last year. While I certainly don't try to minimize the destruction, death and disaster that was suffered in the wake of that hurricane, but so much blame was put on the various government officials, that it seems the concept of personal responsibility and preparation is completely taken away. It seems, in today's world, that when something bad happens, it's nobody's own responsibility to make the best of the situation or to try and make do with where things are at. Instead, we just talk to the media and get them to help us foster the need we have to blame others.