CrossCurrents

CrossCurrents A Catholic Reflects on Faith in Our Times

Bernard F. Swain, Ph.D.

Katrina’s Warning

When my son Tim called Sunday morning, my first words were, “Where are you?” He was driving his girlfriend back to school for her senior year at Loyola University in New Orleans, and I was concerned about the approaching storm. Naturally, I was greatly relieved to learn they had done the prudent thing: after arriving in New Orleans from Atlanta on Friday, they turned right around and drove back to Atlanta on Saturday, getting out of harm’s way before the evacuation gridlock that gripped the region on Sunday. Many others, of course, who were not so lucky.

In Hurricane Katrina’s wake, a region is reeling, overwhelmed by the immensity of destruction. A shocked nation mobilizes to assist in support relief efforts, while also preparing for the unprecedented national consequences of a million homeless, a major city shut down, astronomical recovery costs, and a seriously ruptured energy supply system. A saddened world meanwhile wonders once more at the awesome (and awful) power of nature.

It’s no surprise that we live in a dangerous world. But after four years of worrying about Al Qaeda and three years of “Iraq-is-a-threat-to-us” rhetoric, it’s all too easy to forget that neither distant dictators nor Islamic extremists pose the greatest threat to our safety and well being. Katrina’s wakeup call may warn us to get our safety priorities straight.

In fact, our hope for better world faces several greater threats. Christian faith demands an honest, clear-eyed view of the real world – a world where terrorism ranks last on a “worst threats” list like this:

1. Natural Threats. The apocalyptic images pouring out of the Gulf Coast are horrific reminders that no destructive power exceeds nature’s own. Katrina seconds the motion made by the Tsunami: we ignore nature at our peril, and all pretense to build a human civilization immune to nature’s forces ultimately serve only to demonstrate our human folly. Katrina appears to be the “Big One,” our worst disaster, killing more people than the 9/11 terrorists. If not, it will only be because some people heeded the warnings of impending danger.

2. The Nuclear Threat. This is the real terror threat, of course. The Cold War’s nuclear arms race threatened the human race with planetary disaster far beyond what any present terrorist group can accomplish. That threat still exists from US and Russian arsenals. In fact, campaigns for new weapons threaten to make nukes even more dangerous than before. That’s why the Catholic Church condemned that arms race as a crime.

Worse, the US alone remains committed to “First Use” of nuclear weapons to repel a non-nuclear threat. We threaten to use our nukes to scare off attackers, just as we used them to scare Japan into surrender. It is a terror policy whether we admit it or not—and it remains the biggest such threat on earth.

3. Civil Disorder. It is not theft that makes the looting in New Orleans scary; it is the threat of lawlessness. The world has seen worse in recent years: the war in Kosovo, the sudden “machete” genocide in Rwanda, the massive death and dislocation currently underway in Darfur, and even the steadily mounting toll in Iraq, now well over 100,000. worldwide, civil disorder threatens death in the millions.

The breakdown of civil order can be triggered by hate, greed, and anger—or by desperation, fear, and hunger. The video scenes from New Orleans are unmistakable proof that race and class play major roles.

But whatever the cause, civil unrest brings much worse than looting and lawlessness: it brings massacre, war, genocide, famine. We’ve seen it following the collapse of the Soviet Empire, following the emergence of African nations from colonial rule, and even following the “liberation” of people oppressed by tyrants likes Saddam Hussein. How can we deny that a world-wide system of humane and civil order must be a major priority?

4. Environmental Threats. Katrina’s impact reflects our damaged environment: The wetlands that once protected New Orleans have eroded alarmingly in recent years; the rising sea level has made storm surges powerful enough to break all existing barriers; public spending has been inadequate to reverse those trends.

The earth itself seems to be warning us that our stewardship of God’s creation is a serious moral responsibility, which we shirk at our own risk.

5. Abortion. People may seek to justify choosing abortion in particular cases, but abortion remains a great cause of human death—roughly 1 million lives per year in America alone since 1973. Among abortion opponents, the old strategy of legal prohibition has given way to a complicated campaign to regulate abortion’s practice.

Many people (on both sides) want to make abortion history, but our leaders have failed to devise a practical strategy. So our country remains as divided now as it was 30 years ago, when abortion first became legal. Can we really claim righteousness for 30 years of cultural polarization, when what we need is a unifying national movement to make abortion socially unacceptable behavior?

6. Health Threats. Americans like to think we are the world’s healthiest humans. AIDS and malnutrition and bacterial disease clearly do not threaten us as they do other humans. Yet Catholics, as citizens of the world, can never be complacent when millions die preventable deaths for lack of food, affordable medicine, or access to healthcare.

But in fact Americans are not the healthiest humans. US health statistics on infant mortality, rates of heart disease, or life expectancy itself rank well below other advanced nations. Obesity (the US rate, already the world’s highest, continues to climb) has now replaced smoking as the #1 cause of preventable US deaths. How can we meet this threat and build a healthier nation when millions cannot even pay for the routine care now?

7. “Lifestyle” Threats. None of us will forget the horrifying images from 9/11. But we did forget this: just as many Americans die every month on our nation’s highways. More die from smoking. More die each year from common everyday homicide. It is high time we faced the truth: the world is a dangerous place in part because we live dangerous lives. Our crime rate, our highway death toll, our “lifestyle” deaths all pose the same question: can’t we find a safer, more humane way of life?

8. Terrorists. For many Americans 9/11 was the first proof that terror threatened us. But Terrorism did not begin with 9/11. Had we forgotten Oklahoma City? Or the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993? Did we forget that Ronald Reagan actually declared “War on Terror” first in 1981, and then a State of Emergency in 1985 because “The policies and actions of the government of Nicaragua constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the US”?

Europe has been living with terrorist attacks for more than 30 years, as has Latin American and much of Asia and Africa. “The troubles” flared up in Northern Ireland in 1969; Terrorists attacked the Munich Olympics in 1972; Death Squads killed thousands in El Salvador in the early 1980s; the Contras killed thousands in the late 1980s in Nicaragua; 200,000 have died in Algeria since the rulers there nullified the 1991 elections—which also triggered the Paris subway bombings ten years before the Madrid train attacks, and nearly crashed a jetliner into the Eiffel tower in 1994.

It is insane to justify such attacks, but it is also foolish make them our greatest worry. Simply put, we cannot afford to obsess about a small band of unscrupulous, evil individuals while ignoring the infinitely more massive threats to human life that surround us every day.

To willingly submit to such obsession is nothing more or less than moral blindness. It denies a root belief of Christian faith: evil and its effects are everywhere in the world, within and around all of us. To do the Good, which is God’s Will, we cannot pretend that evil has boiled down to one man, or one movement, or one problem. Such pretense might afford us some phony optimism that we are truly “staying the course,” but it also deprives us of any hope of building a truly safer, less threatening world.

Send Your Comments and Questions to bfswain@juno.com