A front-page newspaper photo shows sick old people, mostly women, lying on flimsy stretchers, with their legs exposed, or on the baggage area conveyer belt as they await evacuation from the New Orleans airport. How heartrending to realize that they have been deprived of dignity, security, community and almost everything else in the last days of their lives!
This image, one of thousands shown by the national media, reveals what residents of that city and other parts of the Gulf coast have endured since the storm hit. Unfortunately, it also reveals what it can be like to be poor and disadvantaged in America. These are the people left behind, literally and figuratively.
Televised interviews with those able to talk have shown many faces of poverty and deprivation. They have been residents of a city where the official poverty rate has reached 28 percent. Most of them are people of color, with low levels of schooling and few if any financial resources as backup for themselves and their families.
The bad effects of inadequate medical and dental care were obvious in the faces of many shown on television. Many adults are clearly overweight and have bad teeth. Surely they belong to the group of some 40 million Americans who lack health insurance and thus go without their basic health care needs receiving attention.
Yet these evacuees have resided in an area that qualifies as a center of great wealth and industry. Many of this country’s exports of farm products and other goods pass through New Orleans on the way to other parts of the world. Similarly, many imports enter through the same port city. And the revenues from the oil and gas industries based in the surrounding area and the tourist business amount to a huge treasure.
This wealth, however, has not benefited the poor of New Orleans to any obvious extent. They have continued to live as a kind of underclass, cut off from the many of the goods that most middle-class people take as their right.
This revelation of another America has come as a shock to many of us who enjoy the good things of life. No one acquainted with the way things are for the poor is surprised except, perhaps, for the sheer extent of deprivation among the people of one beloved city.
Nor should we have been surprised at the woeful failures of our national government to have anticipated the crisis and to have responded promptly and adequately. Among other factors, both failures are the fruit of federal policies that starve human welfare for rigid ideological purposes.
For me, the havoc of Hurricane Katrina itself also belongs to the great mystery of the natural world and its potential for destruction. As we have witnessed memorably in this still new century, that world has not surrendered its awesome power to the control of human beings and presumably never will. We do well to respect the ability of nature to surprise us with its violence.
Despite considerable theological education, I confess no more understanding of what this world’s cruelty means than anyone else. This is why calling it a “mystery” makes sense to me: there is more to be understood than we can ever understand.
Similarly for the evil inflicted by human beings on one another, in this instance the shootings, lootings, and other violent crimes committed by some New Orleanians against defenseless others.
Long ago I learned not to be surprised by the enormity of evil in the human family. Early on, my religious tradition imbued in me the idea that there is something fundamentally askew in us all, a perversity that can lead us to prey on one another.
The industrialized mass slaughter of the Jewish people and others by the Nazis and the butchery of millions of his own people by Stalin, in my own lifetime, have also made it impossible for me to underestimate human savagery.
To these two great mysteries, the world’s evil and our own, I will add a third. How can it happen that some people can live their whole lives escaping the natural and human evils that prevail over so many others? Through no virtue of our own, we have been exempt from the immediate effects of wars, persecutions, dire poverty, and other cataclysms that have engulfed the world’s people at large.
This, too, is a mystery, too much to understand. How is it that, if you were born in a certain place, at a certain time, in particular circumstances, you inherited an exemption from these widespread ills? That has been my fate thus far, something that also leaves me to wonder.
These three mysteries confront me as I look at the world and my own life. Moving into the latter stages of this life does not diminish the power of these mysteries but continues to provoke the same questions over and over.
Richard Griffin