don't forget to blame your enemies...

AP photo from here.

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When disaster strikes human beings always seem to need meaning. I have no wisdom to offer today, no way of finding meaning. I have only outrage that people would claim any of those suffering right now have earned it. Today I read a blogger on the right who accuses New Orleans of earning this tragedy because of their “liberal” ways. Then I read a comment from someone on the left saying that the South earned this because they voted for Bush.

Tragedy is tragic because it’s not fair. It does not happen to people who earned it. So many of those suffering in Louisiana and Mississippi right now are people who were too poor to leave.

I spent two weeks in New Orleans when my aunt used to live there, in 2001. I loved the city. Of the cities I have been to in the U.S.A., New Orleans had the warmest, friendliest population overall. A great variety of people lived there from all religious/ethnic/political stripes. Did people on the religious right deserve mother nature’s wrath because of other people? Does the socialist who only uses public transit deserve to die in a flood because some people voted for Bush?

In truth, Bush did slash funding to SELA (for more information click here) in order to divert money to the war in Iraq, and yes, this probably made things worse for New Orleans (not to mention a lot of the rest of the South than it needed to be). Yet I do not believe that it is the responsibility of people in New Orleans or Gulfport to pay for all of our collective sins (yes I mean all of us who get in our car in the morning and contribute to global warming or all of us who consistently vote for politicians that do not care about state-funded emergency programs). Even Abraham argued to God that a city should be spared if there are “twenty righteous” to be found there (Genesis 18:16ff).

While my own beliefs do hold us as a nation accountable for our contribution to global warming, which has had global weather effects this year on a terrifying scale, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is tragedy because there is no reason to who suffers and who is spared, no logical system of picking out who is righteous and can be saved and who is not and so must be punished.

If you have read this far, may I again urge you to help people with whatever money you may have. Click here for FEMA’s list of donation sites.