An act of God still trumps the acts of men. Hurricane Katrina reminded us of that.
Tradition teaches us to pray. The schools of journalism and title, however, encourage filing grievance and demanding redress. A lot of commentary in the first week after Katrina's landfall was ahistorical and aspersive, and it was repugnant. There were those on the left who believe state and local governments to be vestiges obstructing Washington's divine intervention which President Bush, agnostic of this omnipotence, failed to invoke; but then from the right, an embarrassing stream of contempt from those who dislike the central bureaucracy but, for all the money they claimed it takes from them, expected the same miracles as leftists and shamed the president when miracles did not come.
Remember the early August Air France crash on the Toronto Pearson International Airport runway — in which no one was killed? That was a miracle, small in the scale of suffering but in sharp relief to other accidents because it was so rare. Natural disasters can be understood only in very painful terms; a perspective too narrow, and we will lose our minds. Total destruction of New Orleans, according to analysts, would have literally flattened most of the city — skyscrapers, high-rises, and the Superdome all gone, the dead perhaps approaching one million. Did that happen? As former President Clinton said on television, beside his predecessor, "New Orleans escaped Katrina."
What did happen, almost treacherously, after the hurricane weakened and veered, was on one hand deadly and heavily damaging but on the other precisely what had been predicted if the city's man-made defenses ever buckled. Following that were about three days of what we must accept is yet beyond our jurisdiction. No one wants to contemplate disasters or faithfully accompanying horrors — death, dislocation, epidemics, murder and theft — let alone confront them and suffer loss, or the guilt of the Samaritan who, by his own finiteness, must let some die. Still, destruction comes, and to be flatly incognizant of what these events have always brought and will always bring, as if to shriek "Make it all go away!", is to impeach one's own privilege to speak for others in print and telecast; for it is clear that such a personality deals only in fantasy.
The harrowing first days of rescue and recovery operations in New Orleans provided a helpful, if stomach-turning, reidentification of exactly who divides Americans along lines of heredity, class and appearance. The American Thinker's Richard Baehr pointed out that the neighborhoods of New Orleanian and Mississippian whites, not blacks, were caught by the flood on a rough order of four-to-one — a cross-examination only if you codify human suffering by census category, teasing the idea that honest men weep, succumb or drown differently from one another. But Baehr provided this information because, in fact, some do. A recording artist, a film propagandist, a pair of frocked charlatans, dozens of media agents and intellectuals: prominent fixtures on the left, they accused the president — regardless of federal executive limits in obligation and logistics — of racism or classism, or something.
While that calumny went on a handful of radicals, beneath headlines, modified the broader left's practice of assigning colors to tens of millions of American citizens at a time, based on state electoral endorsement, by refusing to contribute to humanitarian and reconstruction efforts as punishment for the alleged impudence of some of Louisiana's voters in giving the state to President Bush on November 2, 2004. The disavowals were scattered and unofficial, but public nonetheless, echoing sentiments of would-be leftist philanthropists who now have a policy of speeding past when a broken-down car bears a "Bush '04" sticker. Muddled thinking, yes, but the stuff at its foundation is unmistakable. Louisiana's electorate has a Democratic, not a Republican, plurality. New Orleans is two-thirds black. Who else but madmen inaugurate a political renaissance by stranding and starving thousands, and what kind of madmen arrange that for their party's base? One begins to think of a petard and a hoisting.
The criminal element in American society was another reidentification, especially for those who had forgotten or denied it existed. When civil order briefly collapsed in New Orleans the bestial acts of a very few — that in turn disrupted thousands and shocked millions — exposed the mark of Cain lain on every culture and every nation, those gangs in pickups and on foot committing wanton violence a luculent parallel to our enemy in war, in Iraq and Afghanistan. Very alarming; very enlightening.
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin interpreted the rock overturned as the leftward do, offering some practical reason, some rational motivation for armed bands looting and attacking flood victims and rescuers. Roving killers were "Looking for something to take the edge off of their jones," said Nagin, as if the system had let them down. But no moral instruction leads to violating the helpless or their deliverers. Nagin — and by analogy, apologists for civilization's enemies — do not accept that there are men who simply delight in the torment of others. The difference between the Third World, the Second World and the First World is a society's ability to mitigate its criminal minority, increasingly so as it moves towards the latter condition. One appropriately short story was a model of reestablishing the rule of law: on Sunday, a gaggle of thugs shot at Army Engineers repairing a bridge. Police returned fire, and with good aim ended that sliver of a glimpse of authoritarianism.
When its fear and grief subside, America will soon face the question of reclamation of habitats that, go some apothegms, should not be. Now, civilizations are indeed built where they are vulnerable: from Pompeii to Herculaneum, Helike to Mesopotamia, India to Japan; cataclysms have swept away thousands, ending epochs.
New Orleans has always been a convenient example of the city that should not be. Too convenient. How far does this appeal for meekness go? Must we be circumspect about erecting houses in the mountains? What about the Mississippi River? And every coastline? Should the millions along the San Andreas Fault, or any segment of the western United States' dizzying earthen mosaic, flee east — skipping past, of course, the tornado-plagued Plains States? I will note that my hometown of North Olmsted sits at a geographic and geothermal intersection, protected from the worst of thunderstorms and flooding — but just how good is that gamble? And those who throw up their hands and head underground should be mindful of cave-ins. "Arrogance" has been ascribed to those who reside at the frontier, wrongly. It is only arrogance when we suffer the earth's wrath with indignation instead of a humble determination to keep sight for blessings and begin again. Galveston, Chicago and San Francisco were a few of many American productions that have risen from devastation. Vows for a Mardi Gras like before the flood have already been heard from Bourbon Street.
Hurricane Katrina and the New Orleans flood of Oh-Five will be arranged and compressed with its class in American history, one more chapter recording man's struggles with and mastery of his present situation. It will be abridged when another unforeseen and unprecedented earthly swell rises, today's lessons to be referenced and applied only by those to have learned them. To those wise few, we should listen.