c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Post-Katrina blaming offers many targets.

To deal with epic devastation and societal breakdown, we can blame a French decision in 1718 to build a colonial city beside a bayou. We can blame that city’s role in America’s slave trade and conflicted attitudes toward residents of color.

We can blame poorly conceived levees, too much building amid water, and more recent decisions to eviscerate and politicize federal agencies charged with disaster response. We can blame a far-away war for squandering military resources needed at home. We can blame insensitive federal leaders, a sluggish bureaucracy, infighting among agencies and prevailing incompetence.

While that fur flies, we hold a disturbing lens into who we are and what our future holds.

On the one hand, a nation’s capacity for compassion has shown forth gloriously. Donations are pouring into relief agencies. Universities are welcoming transfers from schools in flooded areas. People are opening their homes. Leaders in Texas deserve special praise. The fact that citizens are appalled by incompetent officials is a hopeful sign that we still recognize the difference between competent and incompetent.

On the other hand, the aftermath of Katrina reveals deep divisions in the populace, disturbing dysfunction in basic government services and a growing sense of abandonment.

The burden of Katrina fell most harshly on the poor. Similar conditions exist throughout America: a growing population of the desperate, who are jobless or near-destitute, who live isolated lives in conditions other citizens don’t see, who feel abandoned by the nation they are expected to salute.

People in Katrina’s path are voicing what many feel whenever they deal with federal, state and local government: helpless, bewildered and abandoned. Whether those perceptions are fair, scenes from New Orleans feed a growing dismay with the condition of America’s public sector.

New Orleans’ rapid collapse into chaos feeds fears far beyond the hurricane belt. What about earthquakes in California, tidal surges in Manhattan and Boston, flooding rivers in Cincinnati or St. Louis? Or human-made disasters such as terrorist attacks, breakdowns at aging nuclear power plants or water-supply failures?

Many wonder if the covenant between government and citizens has been so starved of funds, goodwill and wise leadership that any disruption, from a natural disaster to a normal factory closing, could produce civil chaos.

In the religious realm, this is an energizing time. We do well in crises and, despite our arguments, have an instinct for giving care. But we need to ask ourselves: Where have we been? How could our social order have become so divided and so dependent on perpetual poverty? How could Christianity have been so easily co-opted as a political tool? We know what Jesus said about oneness and self-sacrifice. Why, then, are we apostles of division and self-interest?

Even as the Gulf region tries to rebuild, basic questions remain. In a sense, our nation’s history has led inexorably to scenes of poor people crying out for help and not receiving it. Would it have been different if those crying out had been white and prosperous, or residents of a “wholesome” Bible Belt city? I don’t think we know, and that is disturbing. It could be that any area is one large accident away from disorder and abandonment. Or that black and poor bear the brunt in America.

Going forward, citizens can vote and lobby for better government services. The issue isn’t more government or less, but better performance and adequately funding basic services. As citizens, we can open our doors, turn outward to our neighbors, and reverse decades of isolation and distrust.

As the faithful, we face the hard work of standing down from our righteous ramparts and examining where four centuries of religious squabbling, fragmenting, scapegoating and sectarian pride have left our nation.

MO/PH END RNS

(Tom Ehrich is a writer, consultant and leader of workshops. His book, “Just Wondering, Jesus: 100 Questions People Want to Ask,” was published by Morehouse Publishing. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C. His Web site is http://www.onajourney.org.)