September (Web-only) 2005

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After the Asian tsunami last December, the outpouring of help, rescue, and relief efforts assured many that God was good despite the disaster. But the chaos into which New Orleans has fallen is so disturbing that it makes a convincing argument for either God's absence or man's depravity.

News reports abound with stories of death, rape, murder, and theft. "Thursday saw tens of thousands being evacuated by bus to Houston from the hot and stinking Superdome. Fistfights and fires erupted amid a seething sea of tense, suffering people who waited in lines that stretched a half-mile to board yellow school buses. The looting continued."

The Associated Press reports, "By Thursday evening, 11 hours after the military began evacuating the Superdome, the arena held 10,000 more people than it did at dawn. Evacuees from across the city swelled the crowd to about 30,000 because they believed the arena was the best place to get a ride out of town."

"Hoodlums" have shot at rescue helicopters sent to evacuate people stranded on rooftops and in hospitals that can no longer take care of patients. At the New Orleans Convention Center, 15,000 to 20,000 people took a shelter only to find lawlessness. When a helicopter arrived to drop off food and water the thronging crowd was so thick it couldn't land. Instead the helicopter dropped supplies from the air.

Tunku Varadarajan in The Wall Street Journal writes:

Physical strength has suddenly become more important than knowledge, or education. Everything smells.

For Americans, this is humbling, and aggravating. … There has been a descent so clear into indecency that one must address it as pressingly as the breakdown of the city's levees. It is as if the moral and civic "levees," too, were overwhelmed ...