Katrina

Like everybody else, I am obsessed with looking at the devastation from Katrina. New Orleans, a city I love and have great memories of, is underwater and very very far from recovery. The Mississippi Gulf coast is destroyed. Mobile is heavily damaged. I can't really get over it. I can hardly believe what I'm seeing.

I was listening to NPR and Daniel Schorr was giving one of his editorials. You may remember Schorr from CBS News back in the day. Now he is a senior correspondent on NPR. Anyway, he was relating recent talk about "intelligent design" (I'll post something about my thoughts on this someday) to the hurricane. Basically he was complaining about how God's creation could be considered "intelligent" when it caused so much destruction on innocent lives. You can listen here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4826756.

I do not agree with him here. Man built a city below sea level. Man built a series of levees to protect himself from nature (and therefore, God). Man built casinos on the Gulf coast. And houses on the shore. Man did all these things. God's creation just did what it does. Hurricanes happen. They always have. When there were far fewer people on the coast, far fewer people were affected. Now, we have large populations there. The creation didn't change. Man's attempt to manipulate it did.

And then there was the editorial from Molly Ivins, the liberal columnist from Austin, TX. She is not a Bush fan. At all. She writes blistering editorials about how wrong-headed his actions are. Pretty much all of them. I usually agree with her. Today, however, she decided to blame the destruction from Katrina on Bush. His environmental policies (which I agree are wrong-headed), his use of the National Guard for duty in Iraq, including equipment (which I agree is inconceivable that a war could be conducted in this way - more on war in a later post), his energy policies (which theoretically severely damaged the shorelines). All of these things resulted in this hurricane to cause the severity of damage. That article is here: http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/1/2005/1197

As I said, I usually agree with her and enjoy her sense of humor. And I can agree that Bush's policies in the areas noted are misguided. But I think she went too far here. Bush's policies didn't cause this. And another president in office - Democrat or Republican - could not have stopped this. This is nature being nature. God's creation doing what it does. Environment policy doesn't change that. Further, I think she does a disservice to all of us liberals out here. She gives ammunition to the rightist columnists and commentators about how wrong it is to use a natural disaster and tragedy to blast Bush.

In a nutshell, bad things happen to good people and bad people. And God gave us a choice in the way we live. We chose to build where we did, knowing that the calm Gulf can sometimes get violent. We have evidence. Don't think that God decided to punish those Gulf states for sins they committed. Don't think of Him as a cruel master who toys with us. God created the Earth for us to live on and he created it with all of it's characteristics (I'll do that blog someday, too). Those include dangerous, violent things. Earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, tornados. God isn't necessarily unleashing these on unsuspecting people. Rather, he created the Earth with it's wonder and awesome power to create and destroy and now it is doing what it does.

I'm terrified and shocked and crushed by the impact of this disaster. I believe that God can only be good. I do not see a contradiction here.