Friends,
While watching the unfolding catastrophe wrought by Katrina on the Gulf Coast, I am struck most not by the devastation, which is significant, nor by the loss of life, which is terrible, but by how our society has treated the poor affected by this hurricane.
It is, simply, unconscionable.
As the well-to-do abandoned New Orleans and its environs in their cars, jamming interstates and secondary roads alike, who was left to bear the brunt of the storm? Who were the people jammed, like cattle, into the Superdome?
They were the poor.
They were people the media euphemistically said were "unable to leave." By this, of course, we should read people without the economic resources needed to secure safe lodging outside areas being targeted by the storm. When I saw those lines of cars leaving the city and when I saw people, mostly black and poor, being herded into the Superdome because they could not afford to leave I was reminded of that scene from the movie Titantic where desperate steerage-class passengers, knowing they were doomed and had been abandoned by the "better sorts," cried to be let out.
I am not religious. In fact, events like this hurricane merely reconfirm for me my belief that God does not exist. Yet, despite my unbelief, I find the teachings of Christ wholesome and useful. Love thy neighbor as thy would love thyself is a true and good maxim to live by, yet, I wonder, who loved the wretched poor left to fend for themselves as Katrina made landfall? Not their better off neighbors, who fled the fury of the storm, and surely not their government, who herded them into a "shelter of last resort" instead of trying to make accommodations for them outside the city.
Disaster and crisis often tell us who we are, both as individuals and as people. How we treat the most vulnerable among us, both as individuals and, again, as a people, speak volumes about our character. As I watched the screaming wind, the lines of fleeing cars, and the abandoned, huddled poor, on television, the only thing I could think of was that something was terribly, terribly wrong in America.
Is this what Jesus would do? I don't think so, but it is apparent that this is what we, as a people do.