Aside from a lot of bad personal stuff going on, the situation in NO has just made me numb. All of this is just unbelievable — Americans dying of dehydration, Americans raping children, Americans stealing to survive. We’ve seen enormous acts of heroism and sacrifice, but it is the darker side of this tragedy which draws my attention. People abandoned, desperate, and suffering will breakdown and behave as brutes: they take food and clothing to survive; the take guns to feel safe and protected; they take things to feel propertied; and they perform unspeakable acts to feel in control of their lives. We cannot imagine the pain and loss of these people — our neighbors; our fellow citizens.
Thomas Hobbes wrote, several hundred years ago, that before the organization of civic society that life was short, brutish, and nasty. In the aftermath of this storm, it seems that we have returned to our roots. Yet, this behavior is not limited to the children of Katrina, but seems to extend to those sitting in their upholstered offices.
One ‘christan’ has spoken with glee of the destruction:
“New Orleans now is abortion free. New Orleans now is Mardi Gras free. New Orleans now is free of Southern Decadence and the sodomites, the witchcraft workers, false religion — it’s free of all of those things now,” Shanks says. “God simply, I believe, in His mercy purged all of that stuff out of there — and now we’re going to start over again.”
It is hard to imagine anyone suggesting that the citizens of NO are the recipients of some kind of divine or earthly justice — let alone a man of christ. The spirit of these words are more reflective of Torquemada then of a modern pastor. It is men like this, and others who cite divine retribution for the storm, and those who profit from this despair that are the true criminals — they are the looters of the human spirit, the defilers of the American dream.
