Almost every schoolchild reads Lord of the Flies, but as hurricane Katrina proved a few weeks ago, it takes little to turn novelist's dystopias into tragic reality. From Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake to José Saramago's Blindness; the writer's imagination is little exaggeration on reality. Curiously, the illness that overturns world order in Saramago's novel is a "white blindness." In the case of New Orleans, it's difficult not to assess the post-storm debacle as a serious case of "black blindness": the vast majority of those affected by the storm being black (and poor), an indictment of a nation's insistent blindness to the racism that shackles its black population.
It is deeply, deeply troubling from a personal and global human perspective that blacks, who comprise about 13 per cent of the U.S. population, are so disproportionately represented in the poorest class. But in Canada, we need to solve our own aboriginal issue before dispensing advice to others. As serious as racism and poverty are in the world's richest nation, that is an issue Americans must struggle with.
Many commentators were quick to jump on the anti-Bush bandwagon. Canadians scolding the U.S. president on a domestic issue is little more than anti-Americanism. There is a clear warning in scripture about pointing out specks in another's eye while blinded by log-jams in one's own.
In fact, while we have made different choices about both government and, relatedly, how we spread our collective wealth among citizens, the poverty rate is an unacceptable 12 per cent in both Canada and the United States. The CIA lists Croatia, China, Mauritius, Ireland, France, Belgium and Taiwan as among the 13 countries with a lower poverty percentage.
What Katrina revealed is that our civility — our forms of government, criminal and civil courts, educational facilities, banks and other commercial institutions — our entire infrastructure as a nation can collapse as fast as earthen levees breached by a storm surge. No nation, however wealthy, can afford to be smug about how easily social order breaks down in the face of massive disasters.
If oil-rich Texas is feeling swamped with refugees, we ought all to reflect on how immeasurably more burdensome the refugee crises in Sudan, Congo and other similar countries must be, where there is no National Guard to arrive — even a few days later than expected – with food, water, medicine and shelter.
Nor are we in a position to shame the looters. It may be that easier access to more guns exacerbated the situation, but psychologists have studied our individual and collective behaviour enough to show that theft and violence will break out sooner or later among humans in the midst of any similar trauma, whether people are educated or illiterate, rich or dirt-poor.
But if the fallout from Katrina revealed the fragility of our civility, surely the test now for us who are physically removed from the situation is how we respond – not merely in our tangible charity to those who have suffered loss – but in our attitudes towards all those rogue elements that drowned the city as quickly as the waters.
As people of faith, we need to address poverty and prejudice in our communities. We need continually to be looking for ways to help the marginalized both as individuals and as part of the institutional church: some people are only able to write a cheque, but it's also easy to hide behind cheques.
Jesus and the prophets call us again and again to address injustice in the world and to build community. Caring for our neighbour means giving something of ourself. That and the faith that underlies our actions are about all that separate us from the dissolution of community into free-for-all chaos. If we can learn that, the misery of New Orleans will have produced some good.
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