“Remember what it felt like to go back to work September 11th, or the 12th or 13th? We were mad yet proud of Americans. Well, today I felt no such pride… embarassment, frustration, sadness. What has happened to turn people in this? What happened to the ‘everyone there for each other’ of 2001? We can’t recover because people are forming terror militias to steal diapers and Coors.” – Chuck Wojack
In the early morning hours of August 31st, a massive hurricane ravaged the southern coast of the United States, destroying most of the coastal cities in Alabama and Louisiana and plunging New Orleans into a half-drowned anarchy, full of lawlessness, looting and lunacy.
Some people are glibly attributing both physical and social damage to Hurricane Katrina, but that response is short-sighted at best. If you build a city that only survives by levee’s holding back the great ocean’s heave, imminent destruction is a way of life. It is of very little comfort to look out your window and realize that life goes on because some state worker is tending a wall that separates you and ruin. But people lived there, bought property, raised families, knowing full well that life could, at any given moment, be swallowed by the sea. Normality depended on the public maintenance of a man-made structure.
It is in that same way that the tragic weakness of our American society is painfully laid bare. People who for decades have been taught to forsake any absolute sense of right and wrong in a meteorological instant lost the social structure that held them together. Now we have roving bands of thugs smashing store windows because the moral infrastructure has disintegrated and has revealed the anemic state of the American citizen. And to further illustrate the point, we will be the same people two weeks from now as we were two week ago, only with higher gas prices.
A song came to mind today as I read a story about looters stampeding a young woman, and I laughed a very sad laugh. “I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free.” At least I know I’m free? There is a fate worse than national bondage. I would gladly clamp the fetters around my ankles any day over the moral bankruptcy I saw footage of today. De Tocqueville warned that if we ceased to be good, we’d lose our greatness. I see enough chest-thumping in this country, but very little genuine goodness.
Now there is no sin in being the biggest or the strongest, if we are such a thing, but there is a great deal more expected. If a child and his father are wrestling, who is expected to restrain? I’ve read enough “bomb-them-to-hell” editorials and comments to be afraid for the future of this country. I do not want America to be the leader of the world if she does not deserve it. How can we preach freedom and democracy when our own moral underpinnings have been so eroded as to render these two ideals pointless? Why fight for freedom when the free people destroy? Why fight for democracy when the masses are in hysteria? I’m certain that there are planks enough in the waters of New Orleans to pull one from our own eyes.
And it is in this devastation, that tragic loss of life and social normality, we see not so much destruction as revelation: The weakness of man-made structures made evident against the surge of natural forces. It is going to take something much more than social programs and hand outs to revive the decaying soul of the American citizen. Throwing money at moral depravity is buying a rapist a new suit. It just makes him harder to pick out among the crowd. And I’m afraid that far too many Americans are sinkholes, gilded beauties with a rottenness inside that only a natural disaster can uncover.
The rains came down and the floods came up and the reality of our American depravity was exposed.
